I’ve argued all year that Intel wasn’t a dead dog, it was a strategic asset. Back then I wrote that the Trump administration’s policy push and capital commitment to on-shore chipmaking made failure politically and economically ‘impossible.’ That wasn’t bravado: it was reading the map.
I explained the thesis in a five-minute rant on YouTube on 15 August.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jMYYNGepuA&t=116s
Why does any of this matter? Because semiconductors are the beating heart of modern industry. The US-China contest is no longer academic or diplomatic, it’s industrial. Most advanced fabs sit in Taiwan and China; that concentration is a single point of failure for everything from phones to fighter jets. The moment geopolitics turns “spicy”, supply chains fracture, and companies that rely on offshore fabrication, think the current Apple configuration have to scramble to adapt or fail. US policy is now explicitly about re-industrialisation: rebuild ‘the workshop of the world’ onshore and you regain leverage. That is the context in which Intel’s strategic role becomes obvious.
This is a chart I drew in the youtube video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfLzfCH_ghg
Here we are now.
Seeing how this prediction is spookily on the nail, it seems good to leave the future prediction in place as a journey to $50 a beyond.
Intel is one of the only large-scale chipmakers with the current capacity and footprint to be a backbone of on-shore fabrication in the US and Europe. It takes years to build factorories that can make chips. For years the market treated Intel as a stodgy legacy business. I took a contrarian view: Intel is a $53 billion manufacturer of some of the most technically complex artifacts homo sapiens have ever made. Its challenge was and is execution; its opportunity is geopolitics and AI. Those two forces change the valuation landscape overnight.
Evidence arrived fast, first it was a Softbank investment, then a US government buy in then on 18 September 2025 Intel and Nvidia announced a collaboration on AI infrastructure and solutions. Intel’s share price consequentially exploded, up 25% in a single session. That move crystallises the narrative: Intel is now squarely in the AI infrastructure story, not just a commodity fabs operator. When the narrative changes, so do the hedges. For years funds shorted Intel as a hedge against Nvidia or other long tech positions; that market structure kept Intel low, you might say artificially, but the market does what it does because it knows best. However when the underlying strategic game changes, when governments underwrite capacity and AI demand explodes those hedges unwind and reprice the business.
Look at the valuation gap. Intel trades at roughly 2x price-to-sales. Compare that with AMD at roughly 10x, ARM 35x and Nvidia 33x. Even modest multiple convergence delivers substantial upside. At 4x sales Intel doubles; at the “new normal” of 10x it becomes transformational wealth creation. That’s the dream but its backed by a shift in macro policy and industrial dynamics and the fundamentals of clearly stated US policies.
This is not merely a trade idea; it’s a thesis based on the strategic reasoning unfolding everywhere from Shipbuilding to strategic minerals. The US needs secure onshore fabs. The strategy aims at investing in capacity, supply-chain resilience and aspects like rare earths access. Intel sits at the intersection of two mega-trends: the AI revolution and the US-China clash of superpowers. The result is a rare asymmetric payoff: a beaten-down giant with structural cashflows, on the front line of national policy, and with a valuation gap large enough to trigger a rapid rerating.
When Intel was $20 I sounded crazy. Now the White House is talking about industrial policy and the market is finally catching up. Something for nervous investors to remember: when governments decide a sector is strategic, markets follow. And when markets follow, old hedges break and new winners appear.
“Look, I’ve made some great investments in my life — the BEST. And Intel? Intel is one of the greatest. Absolutely phenomenal…”
Who might say that? The question for me is not who, but when.