Intel Stock Jumps 23.6% as US Stake Hits ~$36B
What Happened
Intel posted upbeat earnings and raised its outlook on AI-driven CPU demand, particularly for inference workloads where GPU costs have become prohibitive. The federal government's CHIPS Act-derived equity position quadrupled in market value, making Washington Intel's largest visible shareholder.
My Take
Inference is finally where the inference money is — and it's running on CPUs more often than the GPU-centric narrative admits. Cheap, abundant CPU inference for the long tail of workloads (classification, summarization, light RAG) is a real category that Nvidia can't dominate. The political subplot is bigger though: Washington just discovered it owns a chip giant during a national-security industrial policy moment. That changes export-control posture overnight.
Read Original Source