Intel shares fall 26% to close at $21.48 in their biggest drop since 1974, after the company reported a big earnings miss; Intel's market cap is now below $100B
Intel shares plunged the most in 50 years on Friday, reaching a price not seen since 2013, after the chipmaker reported …
That makes the earnings miss more than a single-session market event: it sharpens the question of whether Intel can restore growth in the businesses investors use to judge its position in the chip cycle.
First-order effects
Intel’s equity value fell below $100 billion after the 26% share-price decline, immediately reducing the market’s valuation of the company.
The miss intensifies investor scrutiny of Intel’s recovery path, particularly after the earlier declines in its Data Center and AI business.
Second-order effects
Intel faces greater pressure to show that its product and execution plans can translate into revenue recovery, rather than relying on an eventual broader semiconductor upswing.
The selloff raises the comparative bar for chip suppliers: investors are likely to distinguish more sharply between companies capturing AI-related demand and those still repairing core business performance.
Third-order effects
If this pattern persists, semiconductor valuations will increasingly hinge on demonstrable exposure to AI infrastructure demand and credible execution, not simply participation in the broader chip market.
A lower valuation can constrain strategic flexibility over time by making large, long-duration investments harder to justify to shareholders; the scale of that effect depends on Intel’s subsequent operating results.
The trend: The episode is part of a widening semiconductor divide in which markets reward proven AI-demand capture while penalizing weak execution in legacy and data-center businesses.
A junior in college on Wall Street Bets today bought $700K of $INTC Intel at $30 a share with their Grandmother's inheritance money. He's down $150K after hours on $INTC falling 20%. [image]
Intel is cooked - 15,000+ to be laid off - $INTC down 29% today - Dividend suspended - Foundry business hemorrhaging billions - Broken Raptor Lake chips unfixable - ARM taking over laptop market - ARM taking over data center market - Totally missed the AI hype train [image]
“Intel is collapsing despite huge subsidies. The reason is we haven't been asking the key players in chips - Apple, Google, Nvidia - to source from Intel.” (Fascinating.)
Sort of buried in this reporting are some distressing investment logics: investors want to see Intel hockey sticking up like Nvidia, and Intel is not because they haven't broken their business model to cater to the LLM bubble. But investors want profit, so here we are.
Intel kept riding the x86 train, but then: - Phones went ARM - Macs went ARM - 1/3 of x86 went AMD esp gaming - AI went to NVIDIA Selling off their XScale ARM business, letting AMD buy ATI, and not dominating over AMD is just a colossal failure. Yet I'm sure there was a lot of
Intel stock is now lower than it was in 1997. Back then, it had the 3rd highest market cap of any US company. Today, it's not in the top 100. It's an interesting anecdote when considering today's high fliers.
Intel's board has repeatedly hired the wrong CEO for its needs ... and done so for decades. 15 years ago, it hired the hardware team from Palm; they designed a competitive mobile processor ... that the higher ups killed. This company is totally broken. https://www.theverge.com/..…
Not to talk boring tech/AI stuff, and following on Intel yesterday, my general view is that there is likely no such thing as an AI PC. Borrowing a line from a conversation with @dickc yesterday, it is a kind of “horseless carriage” error in thinking about the future: naively
I didn't post anything about @intel earnings last night as I kind of wanted to sit on the information a bit longer and digest. I posted my thoughts this morning on @MarketWatch but have some high level thinking here too. https://www.marketwatch.com/ ... - Quarterly revenue drop w…