Apr 28, 2026
It was August 7, 2025 when Donald Trump took to Truth Social to blast Intel and its CEO.
"The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately," he wrote. (1) "There is no other solution to this problem. Thank you for your attention to this problem!"
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The company's stock, at the time, was trading for about $20. (2) Today, shares are more than quadruple that, hitting record highs last week. (3) Last Friday, the company's stock had its best day since 1987, climbing 24%. (4)
It's the corporate comeback of the year.
Analysts are coming around to the company, and CEO Lip-Bu Tan is being heralded as a hero in tech spaces. (5)
Here's how he did it.
Rejecting the premise
Many investors had written Intel off as outdated when Tan came on board. Nvidia had pushed its way to the chip market as the AI revolution got underway.
Still, some shareholders welcomed his arrival.
Shares jumped 10% on the news that Tan was taking the top office. He was seen as eminently qualified and was the first outsider to ever be named a leader at the company.
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Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), however, questioned Tan's ties to Chinese companies and raised concerns about a criminal case at Cadence Design, where Tan served as CEO until 2021. That got Trump involved and things began to move fast.
Tan's first step was to reverse Trump's thinking, something he handled quickly by a meeting in Washington. Ultimately, he ended up convincing Trump to have the government buy a 10% stake in the company.
That cash infusion was the beginning of a series of events that repositioned Intel.
The company's processors are now in demand once again (and Intel says it will work with Elon Musk's and SpaceX's forthcoming Terafab project). (6) And earnings are up, due to that demand, with revenues climbing 7% over a year ago in its most recent report. (7)
"We are embracing our roots as data driven, paranoid, and engineering driven," Tan said on the company's Q1 earnings conference call, referencing Intel cofounder Andy Grove's famous "only the paranoid survive" philosophy.
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Securing additional investors
The government isn't the only entity investing in Intel these days. Last September, Nvidia made a $5 billion investment in the company, with Intel agreeing to fabricate not only AI chips, but Nvidia's RTX GPU. (8)
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The biggest change Tan has brought to the company, though, was a resurgence in demand for its CPUs. When he came on board, the GPU was the chip of choice, but today Intel is supply constrained as companies clamor for its product.
"In recent months we have seen clear signs that the CPU is reasserting itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era," Tan said on the call.
While this growth is occurring, Tan is also resisting the urge to spend. He said on the earnings call that the company will not commit to building factories using its 14A fabrication process (its most advanced) unless it has committed customers.
There's still plenty of room to climb, as evidenced by the stock prices of Nvidia and other leading AI chipmakers, but Intel has shaken off many of its doubters and won back investors.
Their biggest question now is: What's next?
Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
Truth Social (1); Yahoo Finance (2),(7); Google Finance (3); CNBC (4),(5); X (6); Inc. (8)
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Chris Morris is a veteran journalist with more than 35 years of experience, the majority of which were spent with some of the Internet’s biggest sites, including CNNMoney.com, where he was director of content development, and Yahoo! Finance, where he was managing editor. His work has also appeared on Fortune, Fast Company, Inc., CNBC.com, AARP, Nasdaq.com, and Voice of America, as well as dozens of other national publications.
