Intel Stock Hits All-Time High After Preliminary Chip Deal With Apple

Briefly

Apple and Intel reached a preliminary chip manufacturing settlement after greater than a yr of negotiations, per The Wall Avenue Journal.
Intel inventory hit an intraday excessive of $130.57 on Could 8, 2026, surpassing the dot-com period peak of $74.88 from August 2000 by roughly 74%.
President Trump personally lobbied Tim Prepare dinner for the deal, whereas the U.S. authorities holds an almost 10% stake in Intel purchased at $20.47 per share.

Intel and Apple have reached a preliminary settlement for Intel to fabricate a few of the chips powering Apple gadgets, The Wall Avenue Journal reported Friday. Talks between the 2 firms have been ongoing for greater than a yr.

Markets didn’t anticipate the wonderful print. Intel inventory jumped over 13% on Friday, hitting an intraday excessive of $130.57—clearing the corporate’s dot-com period closing excessive of $75.81, set again on the yr 2000, by roughly 72%. For context: twelve months in the past, Intel was buying and selling close to its 52-week low of $18.96.

Which merchandise Intel would manufacture for Apple remains to be unclear, however Apple ships over 200 million iPhones per yr on high of hundreds of thousands of iPads and Macs. It comes at an opportune time for Intel, as Nvidia and AMD have been steadily consuming into its market share.

Proper now Apple depends virtually solely on TSMC for its chips. Intel would possibly give attention to lower-volume merchandise first and supply some diversification for Apple.

The White Home performed a direct function in getting the deal achieved. President Trump personally advocated for Intel to Tim Prepare dinner at a gathering on the White Home. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was additionally concerned within the outreach. With this deal, Intel could also be getting a significant enterprise increase (because the charts present), and the Trump administration could rating a political victory after pushing very vocally concerning the significance of native U.S. chip manufacturing. Apple’s participation, in flip, might assist polish its relationship with the Trump administration.

The federal government has a really private purpose to care. Final August, the U.S. acquired a 9.9% stake in Intel by buying 433.3 million shares at $20.47 every—a complete of $8.9 billion funded by way of the CHIPS and Science Act and safe semiconductor applications, per Intel’s SEC filing. With Intel now buying and selling above $120, that place has ballooned to properly over $50 billion in worth. Trump took to Reality Social final week to say credit score for “making the USA of America over 30 Billion {Dollars}.”

Intel’s turnaround story has had a whole lot of transferring components. The federal government stake was adopted by a Panther Lake chip launch—Intel’s first product on its superior 18A manufacturing course of—then a $5 billion funding from Nvidia and a $2 billion injection from SoftBank. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who took over in March 2025 after years of Intel shedding market share to AMD, Nvidia and Apple Silicon, has been attempting to find companions and prospects ever since.

AMD has been a relentless stress level. As Decrypt reported last October, AMD secured an enormous 6 gigawatt GPU cope with OpenAI—a deal that included OpenAI buying as much as 10% of AMD’s fairness. That was AMD staking its declare in AI infrastructure. Intel, in contrast, was betting on foundry prospects. Now it could have landed the largest one possible.

Apple’s first Intel-manufactured chips, if the timeline holds, could be roughly 18 months away.