Daniel Sparks, The Motley Fool
5 min read
Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) stock has given back a huge part of its 2026 gains. Shares ended at $60.55 on Nov. 3, around 57% under the $140.94 they ended at on June 22. The stock dropped 45% in October alone.
My estimate for $5,000 put into Intel stock at that price is around $5,400 when 2030 ends. That’d be a gain of less than 10% in a bit more than four years, or under 2% a year.
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What surprised me is that this number assumes Intel’s business does well. My estimate has Intel more than doubling its earnings per share from this year to 2030.
Most of what keeps the result down is how much investors pay for Intel’s earnings today.
Image source: Intel.
Intel’s profits have bounced back fast
Showing how quickly the business has turned, Intel’s non-GAAP (adjusted) earnings per share grew from $0.29 in the first quarter of 2026 to $0.42 in the second quarter and $0.52 in the third. A year before, in the third quarter of 2025, it was just $0.23. If Intel meets its fourth-quarter forecast of $0.25, its adjusted earnings per share for all of 2026 would total around $1.48 — more than triple the $0.42 it made in 2025.
Intel’s server chips are doing most of the work. Data center and AI segment revenue jumped 78% year over year to $7.3 billion in the third quarter, the segment’s fastest growth in 15 years.
But that fourth-quarter forecast is a big drop from the third quarter, and PCs are the main reason. Intel expects PC unit sales industrywide to shrink around 12% this year. And it’s planning for about another 10% decline in 2027. It doesn’t expect PC sales to rebound for good until memory supplies improve and prices start to normalize.
What might Intel earn in 2030?
Intel’s revenue may hit around $62 billion in 2026 if fourth-quarter sales land at the midpoint of its $15 billion to $16 billion forecast. This would be up about 17% over $52.9 billion in 2025.
Say revenue rises about 10% a year from there. This puts 2030 sales around $90 billion, over Intel’s all-time high of $79 billion in 2021.
In the third quarter, Intel kept about 17 cents per revenue dollar as adjusted net income ($2.8 billion on $16.5 billion of revenue). I’ve assumed that grows to 20 cents by 2030. That’s still under the more than 25 cents Intel kept in 2021. And it arguably leaves room for a foundry business that reported a $1.9 billion operating loss in the third quarter.
