Intel stock soared to a dot-com era high. Buy or take profits?

Shares of chipmaker Intel on Friday rose to the highest intraday level since 2000. The stock added 2.2% in trading on April 17 and reached $70. Intel shares hit an all-time high of $74.88 on Aug. 31, 2000, but in December of that year they traded in a range of $17.1 to $30 because of the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

The improvement in investor sentiment is due to a number of key events. In early April, Intel agreed to buy a stake in its Irish fab from Apollo Global Management for $14.2 billion - this was seen as a sign of progress in turning around the business, Bloomberg explains. The company also announced that it has joined Elon Musk's Terafab project to develop semiconductors for Tesla, SpaceX and xAI. In addition, Alphabet signed a commitment to use future generations of Intel's Xeon processors in Google's data centers.

The company's growing losses amid large-scale investments in new fabs and declining revenues led to a sell-off, which caused Intel's shares to fall 60% in 2024 and were excluded from the DJIA blue chip index. In 2025, the chipmaker's stock rose 84% after investments by Nvidia, SoftBank Group and the U.S. government.

"There are a lot of drivers for growth [in the stock] in the short term," Gabelli Funds analyst Ryuta Makino told Bloomberg. - Intel looks very attractive." He emphasized that he is "confident" that the company will announce an outside customer for its contract manufacturing business as early as this year, echoing the expectations of Wall Street analysts who speculate that Intel could partner with companies such as Apple or Nvidia.

"The investment message about Intel's value as a strategic asset in contract manufacturing seems to be confirmed on an almost daily basis," Bloomberg quoted Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes as saying in an April 10 note, raising his target price on the stock for the third time this year. He believes Intel's stock gains could continue, especially if major new customers are announced.

"As strategy execution continues, gross margins approach the midpoint of the 40% range, and external contract manufacturing customers (possibly Apple and Nvidia) begin to generate meaningful revenue, we believe Intel stock could eventually trade at around 4x book value, suggesting a price well above $100," he said.

However, most analysts do not expect the stock to rise further. According to MarketWatch, the Wall Street consensus price target is $56.2, suggesting an 18% drop from the closing price on April 16. Now, of the 50 estimates, most are neutral, with 34 analysts advising to hold these securities in their portfolios (Hold). 10 advise to buy, and six advise to sell.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor