Here is a story about how 2026 is reportedly looking like a turning point for Intel investors.
According to the text, the company’s stock is on a strong rise thanks to the new Panther Lake chip and an improved manufacturing process.
Billion-dollar investments from the U.S. government and Nvidia also provide stability. According to the article, Intel is now seen as a critical national player; furthermore, rumors of Apple as a customer are strengthening confidence in the future of the company’s manufacturing business.
Panther Lake is still a bit of a question mark—it was hyped at CES, but the press was only allowed to test the integrated GPU performance, which is actually quite good and will surely take market share from entry-level discrete GPUs in laptops. With this, it’s already somewhat questionable whether it’s worth bundling an RTX 5060 with it—the performance gain is so marginal—and it could eat into NVIDIA’s share of laptop GPUs.
But… the fact that the CPU couldn’t be tested yet at Intel’s CES press area suggests to me that things might not be as rosy on that side. Well, in about three weeks, devices should be available, so we’ll find out then.
Preliminary assessment: “Caught up with AMD’s technical lead and perhaps reached parity using a significantly more expensive and complex manufacturing process, while AMD keeps churning out Zen 5-based laptops on TSMC’s cheaper N5 process—which are still competitive in ultra-portables and win hands down 10-0 in ‘heavy’ laptops (Ryzen 9 AI Max 395+ devices) even though they’re already year-old technology.”
If they get the next generation out on time using the 14A process in a year, there’s a good chance they’ll truly contend for the title of the fastest processor, but AMD will also have new hardware (Zen 6) by then, and it’s still anyone’s guess which will be faster. And whether Intel can get 14A into production on schedule (i.e., mass-produced laptops and desktop processors in a year) remains to be seen.
Trump is touting Intel’s new “sub-2 nanometer” processor and his meeting with CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
The government has taken a ten percent stake in Intel, and Trump claims the investment has already generated tens of billions. The deal accelerates the return of chip production to the United States and may also bring some returns for taxpayers.
Below is a piece on Broadcom that takes a few minutes to read. It states that several analysts have recently been quite positive about Broadcom.
The same points recur in the justifications: the company has a very strong position in enterprise networking chips, and it can also capture more market share from the big cloud giants.
According to UBS, the stock has fallen unnecessarily because, judging by the company’s comments, AI chip sales could grow significantly as early as this year. On the other hand, the text below still hints that better returns could be achieved from some other AI stocks.
TSMC’s results were good; expectations were mostly exceeded quite clearly, and margins, for instance, were exceptionally strong. Naturally, the AI boom kept orders robust, and the company is confident about the future, which is reflected in the brisk expansion of production capacity.
Investors and commentators have been concerned about the adequacy of the electricity supply and the risks of large investments; on the other hand, demand is currently so high that factory capacity can barely keep up, though these factors were likely already known even before the results.
Intel’s last quarter and actually the past year were a bit difficult; well, in the last quarter, earnings and revenue exceeded expectations, but declined compared to the previous year.
Future forecasts are quite subdued, and they didn’t seem to excite the markets, as they fell short of most expectations.
Management emphasized the importance of their processors in the AI era and also the adoption of new manufacturing technology. In general, the company is now focusing on improving operational efficiency and being pioneers in this transition. According to the company, the x86 architecture will maintain its central position in global computing, and they emphasize this because they are strong in this area.
