To The Moon

The narrative of the semiconductor industry in 2026 is dominated by a single, high-stakes recovery story: the "Redemption Arc" of $Intel(INTC)$.

Once the undisputed king of silicon, INTC spent years navigating a wilderness of manufacturing delays and market share erosion.

As of March 2026, the company is increasingly being viewed as the "comeback kid" of the sector, fueled by a transformative leadership shift, breakthrough architecture, and a strategic pivot that addresses both consumer and enterprise needs.

Like any good story, let’s recap from the beginning of 2026…

Earnings Report Card.

On 21 Jan 2026, INTC released its Q4 2025 earnings, that told the story of a company that has stopped bleeding but is still deep in rehab.

For Q4 2025.

• Revenue : came in at $13.7 billion, vs Q4 2024’s $14.26

  billion, its a -4.0% YoY loss. However, it was up against its guidance of $13.3 billion and ahead of many analysts’ expectations.

• Earnings per share (non-GAAP): came in at $0.15 vs consensus $0.08 while EPS GAAP was -$0.12 /share.

• Net Income (GAAP) : was a loss of -$591 million vs Q4 2024’s -$126 million.

• Gross Margin (Non-GAAP): was a reported 34.5%.

• Operating Income: came in at $580 million vs Q4 2024’s $412 million,

  aided by reducing operating expenses.

For FY 2025.

• Revenue : was $52.9 billion, flat year‑on‑year.

• Earnings per share (non-GAAP): improved to $0.42 /share, vs FY 2024’s $0.18; that’s a +133.33% improvement.

• Cash from Operations: came in at $9.7 billion.

For Q1 2026:

• Revenue : estimated to be between $11.7 - $12.7 billion.

• Earnings per share (non GAAP) : expected to be flat at $0.00; while EPS GAAP is -$0.21.

• Outlook Drivers: Soft guidance is attributed to supply shortages for seasonal demand, with improvement expected in Q2 2026.

Notice Points.

Based on above earnings and outlook, below are a few important pointers to note:

• On INTC’s $9.7 billion (FY 2025) and Q4 2025 $4.3 billion - cash flows, they signal that business is (now) throwing off meaningful cash even as it reloads its balance sheet and invests heavily in fabs and process nodes.

• Current quarter revenue forecasted is lower than consensus expectation of approx. $12.5–12.6 billion.

• The softer‑than‑expected Q1 2026 became the trigger for the stock’s brutal selloff.

INTC is not in trouble because of weak demand; it is in a short‑term squeeze because of self‑imposed supply constraints.

As explained during post earnings conference, CFO David Zinsner explained:

• The company drew down inventory in H2 2025 to meet surging AI‑driven server demand.

• By Q1 2026 the ‘excess’ inventory has been used up.

• Since Q3 2025, INTC has begun shifting from wafer production to AI-server wafer production; and is expected to complete the shift by late Q1 2026 - that is anytime now.

• The shift of wafer output toward AI server wafers began in Q3 2025 and is expected to finish and be ready for sales by end March 2026.

• This delay means INTC must carefully control its expansion while waiting for the new capacity to come online.

The Comeback Kid - really ?

To declare INTC the comeback kid, investor may need to look beyond the Q1 2026 guidance and also examine INTC from the following area of focus:

• Technology/products.

• Foundry/process.

• Executive leadership.

Technology & Products.

Servers.

Data centre and AI (DCAI) have become INTC’s growth engine, with demand from hyperscalers, outpacing its production supply.

Q4 2025’s earnings report has recorded that DCAI revenue has gown +9% YoY, despite a marginal fall in Q4 revenue and over +10% of sales are directly tied to AI workloads.

In short, INTC is still very much benefitting from its own AI boom.

Its Xeon server CPUs and accelerators are designed to handle the "general-purpose" tasks that run alongside $NVIDIA(NVDA)$ GPUs and AI ASICs.

This will be INTC’s biggest near‑term upside and forms part of its comeback narrative.

Personal Computers (PCs).

Launched in January 2026, the Core Ultra 300-series (Panther Lake-H) (see above) represents INTC’s latest effort to reclaim its share in the PC market and part of the next chapter in its Redemption Arc..

Basically, INTC’s latest chip focuses on 3 things that matter to every computer user: Battery, Gaming, & AI and made improvements that more than rivals what is currently available in the market.

• Battery : INTC is finally claiming 27+ hours of battery life for movie streaming. This puts INTC-powered Windows laptops on the same level as a MacBook for the first time.

• Gaming: $Advanced Micro Devices(AMD)$ Ryzen (chip) laptop used to be the go-to equipment for users who want to play computer game on a thin laptop without a bulky graphics card.

• Early benchmarks show Panther Lake is up to 70%–80% faster in games than the latest AMD chips. It can even run heavy games like Cyberpunk 2077 smoothly at high settings, something previously impossible for a thin laptop.

• AI: Most PCs rely on its CPU for most of the processes, drains the battery especially when performing AI tasks. INTC has dedicated a "mini-brain" in the new chip, that only does AI.

• The result, the new chip is roughly 4x more powerful for AI related tasks or "future-proofed" for when Windows and other apps when AI-processing is not required.

In summary, INTC is fighting back in both server and home computer markets. By combining new designs with improved manufacturing, the company aims to win back customers lost to competitors like AMD.

Foundry / Process.

The most speculative and capital‑intensive leg of the comeback is its Foundry.

INTC’s foundry business, is chronically unprofitable.

For FY 2025, it posted an estimated -$10.33 billion in operating losses.

What makes it worse is there’s no clear timeline for profitability.

This type of loss run‑rate is enough to justify deep skepticism from short sellers and macro‑focused investors.

The same story also records real milestones: under new CEO Lip‑Bu Tan.

• In Q4 2025, it achieved its first 18A chip shipments - a process node that many analysts view as a prerequisite for INTC to become a credible #2 global foundry behind $Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing(TSM)$ in the latter half of this decade (2025 - 2029).

• TrendForce notes that INTC is seeing a monthly 7% – 8% yield‑improvement on both its 18A & 14A , a rapid by fab‑standards.

• Investors should be pleased to see in a multi‑year foundry ramp.

• On 05 Mar 2026, TrendForce reported that both CFO & CEO are beginning to view the 18A manufacturing technology as a potential offering for external customers. (see below)

• CFO, David Zinsner also highlighted growing interest in 18A-P, variant of 18A that allows customers to fine-tune designs based on power targets.

• And that $Apple(AAPL)$ could be a potential adopter, using the process for future M-series System-on-Chips (SoCs).

After spending $18 billion in 2025, INTC plans keep its budget flat or slightly lower in 2026, with most of planned spending in H2 2026, to build the capacity needed for an expected major surge in demand expected by 2027.

INTC is not stopping investment in its foundry division. It is just trying to invest more precisely and with tighter discipline, that is the playbook of turnaround CEO.

Overall, the mix nuance of (a) continual losses in the foundry segment and (b) clear yield & capacity progress, makes the comeback story compelling.

CEO - 1 Year On.

In March 2025, Lip-Bu Tan took over INTC, amid a perfect storm of :

• A costly foundry‑expansion binge.

• Rival AMD eating into its PC and server share.

• A workforce that had endured years of strategic zig‑zagging and leadership churn.

His game plan for INTC was straight forward - (1) save money and (2) fix the technology.

One year on, he managed to cut costs and as a result, won back big customers.

His efforts helped stabilize INTCl’s finances and secured a $5 billion investment from Nvidia in its Foundry business, a financial lifeline and a strategic endorsement.

Market Paradox: Short Sellers vs Scarcity.

Despite abovementioned wins, INTC remains a battleground stock.

On 10 Mar 2026, reports identified INTC as the most shorted stock on the Dow. (see below)

Short sellers are betting that the immense capital expenditure required for its "Stargate" data center projects and domestic fabs will crush margins before the revenue fully scales.

Besides that, INTC 2025’s stock price gains of +84% gain has already factor-in the “AI & foundry redemption” narrative; any stumble on guidance or execution can trigger a sharp repricing.

Last but not least, INTC’s foundry profitability issue, makes the capital‑allocation story feel binary:

• If foundry payoff materializes, INTC will be a multi‑trillion‑dollar story.

• If it doesn’t, losses incurred could keep eating into returns for years.

However, this bearish sentiment clashes with a harsh reality - a persistent global chip shortage.

On 12 Mar 2026, INTC rose following reports that "everyone is impacted" by the scarcity of midrange and legacy chips.

While competitors focus on high-margin AI chips, INTC’s strategy to dominate "midrange" desktop CPUs, aimed at reclaiming the PC gaming market, seems to be paying off.

By providing high-performance, accessible hardware during a shortage, INTC is gaining market share by simply being the one with the capacity to ship.

In short, INTC is in a unique spot: it has finally stabilized, but still faces a massive, multi-year challenge to fully rebuild.

This tension makes the stock exciting for both long-term investors betting on a comeback and short-term traders playing the daily volatility.

Heracles - Technological Breakthroughs.

Intel’s comeback is not merely a financial story; it is an engineering one.

Intel is attempting to carve out a niche edge, in the future of cybersecurity in homomorphic encryption & data‑centric security, with its Heracles chip.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) capable, the Heracles allows for data to be processed while remaining fully encrypted, a "holy grail" for cloud security.

This capability matters enormously for (a) regulated industries and (b) sovereign‑grade AI clouds where data privacy & compliance are non‑negotiable.

Performance.

The Hercules was presented at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) backed in February 2026., the chip can verify encrypted queries in about 14 microseconds, compared with roughly 15 milliseconds on a standard Intel Xeon server CPU.

According to Tom’s Hardware, the Heracles chip performs FHE mathematical operations 1,074x to 5,547x faster than a standard 24-core Intel Xeon processor. (see below)

The performance jump is not a marketing gimmick; it brings FHE from a slow, impractical curiosity into a domain where it could actually be used for real‑world AI‑inference workloads over encrypted datasets.​

By solving the massive latency issues previously associated with encrypted computing, INTC has positioned itself as the primary infrastructure provider for the next generation of secure AI.

If and when INTC’s Heracles makes this technology widely available, it could allow:

Cloud services:

• To analyze data without ever seeing it.

• INTC may first deploy Heracles internally within its own cloud or partner "hyperscalers" (eg. $Microsoft(MSFT)$ Azure or $Amazon.com(AMZN)$ AWS), offering "encrypted computing" as a premium service.

AI models:

• Trained ‘securely’ on encrypted medical or financial data.

Secure collaboration:

• Between organizations without sharing raw data.

• Given Hercules’s DARPA origins, its "commercial" customers will likely be from sectors like US Defense, Intelligence, & High-stakes financial sectors.

The other advantage of commercialized Heracles will be INTC’s advantage that is less directly exposed to NVDA’s GPU dominance and more aligned with policy‑driven demand for on‑shore, secure compute.

For the comeback narrative, Heracles will be pivotal to INTC’s image shift from a laggard on AI accelerators to a specialized enabler of secure AI computation.

Technical Analysis.

Is INTC’s technical indicators consistent with its comeback story ? Let’s find out. (see below)

As usual, I will be looking at INTC’s simple moving averages, MACD and RSI.

Simple Moving Averages (SMA).

As of US’s Wed, 18 Mar 2026 midday, INTC’s stock price was $45 /share; trending below its (a) 20-day SMA ($45.31) and (b) 50-day SMA ($46.39) and above its 200-day SMA ($33.94).

They are indicating that INTC is in a long-term bull market but is facing a short-term correction or period of "indecision" at the moment.

MACD.

• Both MACD line (-0.17) and Signal line (-0.09) are below the Zero line, signaling that the shorter‑term trend is still tilted to the downside.

• The negative divergence (-0.09), this indicates weakening momentum despite recent price gains, as short-term averages slow relative to the signal.

RSI.

• With a reading of 48.27, INTC is in near neutral momentum territory, just below the 50 centerline.

• This corresponds with a balanced, slightly more “selling‑pressure” than buying‑pressure regime over the measured 14-day lookback period.

Economic and Geopolitical Impact

Like it or note, INTC’s technical indicators are pressured by 2 major external forces.

Firstly, US economic reports from last week showed (a) hotter-than-expected inflation and (b) a resilient US labour market, leading to probability that US Fed will not cut interest rate in their March FOMC meeting.

INTC, with its high debt-service requirements for its fab construction, will be subjected to a "higher-for-longer" environment puts a ceiling on short-term price appreciation.

Secondly, the 2½ week-old conflict in the Middle East has introduced a "risk-off" sentiment across the tech sector.

Intel with ties to the region through its major R&D hubs and manufacturing presence in Israel, may face potential supply chain disruptions or operational delays - thanks to the short-sightedness of the incumbent government.

The story of the "comeback kid" remains intact but fragile, through no “current” fault of its own.

INTC’s ‘latest’ leading‑edge semiconductor and AI‑infrastructure story suggest the stock is only stalling, not derailed, in the midst of a structurally positive comeback phase. Agree ?

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