Two years ago, it seemed like nobody wanted to touch Intel (NASDAQ: INTC). The company that basically invented the modern chip industry had turned into its own cautionary tale, posting an $18.8 billion net loss for 2024 while it fell behind Nvidia in artificial intelligence (AI) and behind Taiwan’s foundries in manufacturing.
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Then something strange happened. The U.S. government bought a stake in Intel. So did Nvidia. So did SoftBank. Companies and governments don’t usually hand over billions to a business they think is finished, and that’s the real reason I think the next 14 months matter more for this stock than almost any stretch in Intel’s recent history.
The chip that actually has to work
Turnarounds aren’t real until a real, working product ships, and Intel is finally shipping. In July, the company said its newest Arizona fab had entered high-volume manufacturing on a subset of its Core Ultra Series 3 chips, known as Panther Lake, the first processor built on Intel 18A, which Intel calls the most advanced semiconductor process ever developed and manufactured in the United States. Its second-quarter 2026 release adds that the next node behind it, 18A-P, had already entered risk production, meaning Intel isn’t just trying to catch up on one generation, it’s trying to stay on pace for the one after. On the data center side, that same release says Intel also launched Xeon 6+, its first server chip built on 18A.
Why the smartest money in the room bought in anyway
Money talks, and in 2025 three very different yet massive buyers said the same thing with their wallets. The U.S. government invested $8.9 billion in Intel common stock, structured largely out of unpaid CHIPS Act and Secure Enclave funding, in exchange for roughly 275 million shares and warrants for up to 241 million more. Nvidia added $5 billion, and SoftBank put in another $2 billion, both also in Intel common stock. None of this money really guarantees Panther Lake sells well, or that Intel’s foundry business ever turns a real profit. But I think it’s an odd thing to do if you think a company is circling the drain, and you don’t have any faith in it.
That said, I won’t pretend this is a clean story. Intel raised another $20 billion through a common stock offering this past August, priced at $95 a share. A raise that size dilutes existing shareholders even while it shores up the balance sheet. That’s on top of the hundreds of millions of shares discussed above already issued to the government, Nvidia, and SoftBank, which means every dollar of future profit gets split more ways than it used to. Retail (the common investor) is getting the short end of the stick.
