There is a specific inflection point in every dramatic stock comeback, and it almost never arrives at the actual bottom. At the bottom, the argument is still about survival.
The real turn comes later, once the earnings beats start stacking up and the bear thesis simply stops holding together logically.
For most of the past three years, betting against chip stocks outside of Nvidia was close to a consensus trade on Wall Street. The artificial intelligence boom created a clear early winner, and every other chipmaker was left sorting through what that meant for their future. Legacy manufacturers with aging fabrication processes, ballooning debt, and shrinking market share got hit hardest.
Watching one particular American chip giant fall from its position as the defining force of the PC era to a company the Dow Jones Industrial Average no longer wanted was one of the more instructive storylines in technology investing.
That company missed mobile. It missed the early AI wave. It watched competitors lap it repeatedly, then laid off more than 20,000 employees and started from something close to scratch.
Then things changed. Quietly at first, then all at once.
This week, after Intel delivered one of the most surprising earnings reports in the semiconductor sector this year, CNBC’s “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer posted on X (formerly Twitter) a verdict that cut through all the Wall Street hedging: “Intel is such a horse. I have NO bear case.”
What Cramer saw in Intel’s blowout quarter
Intel’s first-quarter 2026 results reset the narrative completely.
Revenue came in at $13.6 billion, up 7% year over year and roughly $1.3 billion above the Wall Street consensus, according to CNBC. Adjusted earnings per share landed at $0.29. Analysts had been looking for $0.01.
Related: HSBC resets Intel price target for the rest of 2026
I ran those numbers twice when the report dropped. A 28-cent beat against a one-cent estimate is not a beat in any normal sense of the word. That is a different ballgame entirely.
The Data Center and Artificial Intelligence segment generated $5.1 billion, a 22% jump year over year and well above the $4.41 billion analyst estimate, according to Quartz. Intel Foundry revenue climbed 16% to reach $5.4 billion. Intel shares surged more than 16% in after-hours trading on April 23.
CFO David Zinsner told investors on the earnings call that revenue would have been “meaningfully higher” if Intel could manufacture enough chips, according to CNBC. Asked to quantify the gap between demand and available supply, Zinsner told analysts it “starts with a B,” per Motley Fool’s transcript of the call. A production bottleneck as your worst problem is a completely different position than a demand problem.
Cramer reinforced his call the following morning. “The biggest risks were taken off the table with Intel when Nvidia stepped in,” he said on CNBC on April 24. When your former rival validates your manufacturing capability with real investment dollars, the risk conversation changes.
Photo by hapabapa on Getty Images
How Intel rebuilt after years of missed steps
The turnaround has a name: Lip-Bu Tan, who took over as CEO in March 2025 after Pat Gelsinger resigned under pressure from Intel’s board in December 2024, according to TheStreet.
Tan inherited a company by his own public admission that was no longer competing at the highest level. “Twenty, 30 years ago, we are really the leader,” he told staff in a company-wide employee broadcast. “Now I think the world has changed. We are not in the top ten semiconductor companies,” Tan added, as reported by TheStreet.
That kind of honesty from a new CEO is rare, and it signaled that the old playbook was gone.
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What Tan did next was disciplined and fast. Intel cut more than 20,000 jobs, pared back its foundry ambitions, and imposed strict capital spending discipline across four consecutive quarters of improving results, according to Calkalistech.
The U.S. government’s $8.9 billion stake in Intel, described by Calkalistech as the “first of its kind for a major technology company,” became the financial anchor for the recovery.
Tan put the company’s AI positioning in plain language during the Q1 earnings call. “The CPU is reinserting itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era. This isn’t just our wishful thinking, it’s what we hear from our customers,” he said, according to CNBC.
He also confirmed that Intel 18A yields are now “running ahead of internal projections,” Intel’s Q1 press release confirmed.
My read on that yield shift is significant. As recently as January 2026, Tan had told investors that 18A yields “still do not meet my expectations.” The turn from “below expectations” to “ahead of projections” in a single quarter is exactly the kind of inflection that reprices a turnaround story.
Intel’s Q1 2026 numbers in plain language
Here is what the quarter actually showed.
- Revenue: $13.6 billion, up 7% year over year, against a Wall Street estimate of $12.32 billion
- Non-GAAP EPS: $0.29, versus a consensus estimate of $0.01
- Data Center and AI revenue: $5.1 billion, up 22% year over year
- Intel Foundry revenue: $5.4 billion, up 16% year over year
- Q2 2026 revenue guidance: $13.8 billion to $14.8 billion, versus the $13.03 billion Wall Street had expected
- INTC year-to-date gain: More than 123% as of late April 2026, surpassing Intel’s dot-com bubble record price
Analyst upgrades followed fast.
UBS raised its Intel price target to $83 from $65 but kept a neutral rating, citing ongoing execution risks, as highlighted in my TheStreet coverage.
Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore raised his target to $56 from $41, projecting 30% year-over-year growth in Intel’s data center segment for 2026, TheStreet reported.
Freedom Broker upgraded Intel to buy with a $100 price target, while KeyBanc set the most aggressive call on the street at $110, according to Benzinga.
What the Intel rally means for your portfolio right now
Cramer’s “no bear case” call carries weight because he spent years watching Intel struggle and saying so publicly. When he removes the bear case on a legacy chip name entirely, the reasoning behind it matters more than the headline.
Your clearest indicator heading into Q2 is whether Intel hits the midpoint of its $13.8 billion to $14.8 billion revenue guidance while continuing to improve foundry margins. If Tan delivers on both, Cramer’s horse metaphor will age extremely well.
If manufacturing execution stumbles against a stock priced for flawless execution, this rally gives back serious ground fast.
Intel CFO David Zinsner made a revealing statement back in January, before most of this run happened. He purchased nearly $250,000 of Intel shares on the open market after the post-earnings drop, according to TheStreet. Open-market insider buys are not guarantees, but they are real skin in the game. From that entry near $42, the CFO who said revenue demand “starts with a B” is sitting on a position that looks significantly better today.
Cramer’s verdict may be short on words, but the story it’s summarizing is anything but simple. Intel is relevant again in the AI era. Whether it stays relevant long enough to justify where the stock sits today is the bet you’re making every day you hold INTC.
Related: Major Wall Street firm makes a bold new call on Intel stock
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