Should You Buy Intel Stock Because The Comeback Is Working?
Intel (INTC) has been repriced as a comeback over the past year, and the products are cooperating. Revenue reached $16.1 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 25% from a year earlier, while trailing-twelve-month revenue was up 7.5% to $57.0 billion. The server line is supply-constrained. The harder question is what your money buys at this price.
Why Is Intel Growing Again?
The growth sits in one place. Intel’s data center and AI group brought in $6.3 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 59% from a year earlier, and Xeon 6 is one of the fastest-ramping products in the company’s history. Demand keeps outrunning supply, by management’s account, with the industry short of wafers, memory, and substrates.
The client side contributed $8.9 billion, but management said the market remains softer and expects the business to be down year over year. Both product groups make money. The client group turned 26% of its second-quarter revenue into operating profit, the data center group 40%. The product businesses are profitable, but the comeback is being driven primarily by data centers and AI.
Where Does Intel’s Product Profit Go?
Into the factories. Intel Foundry took in $5.8 billion in the second quarter of 2026, nearly all of it from Intel itself, and lost $2.1 billion doing it, $348 million less than the quarter before. Only $293 million came from outside customers. The foundry is still an expensive internal supplier.
So the company numbers look nothing like the segment ones. The trailing twelve-month operating margin is 7.6% against 18.6% for the S&P 500, and Intel still posted a net loss of $11.3 billion over those twelve months. There is no earnings multiple to argue about. What you pay is 9.3 times sales, against 3.2 for the index.
Closing that profit gap is not Intel’s call alone. It depends on outside chip designers picking its fabs, and the pitch to them rests on 14A. The company’s own timetable puts risk production for internal products in the second half of 2027 and a committed high-volume ramp in 2028. Capital spending runs to more than $20 billion for 2026, with 2027 guided higher again.
You Are Paying For The Fabs Either Way
The stock has already run. Intel has returned 327% over the trailing twelve months, has given back 5% over the trailing three months, and sits about 26% below its 52-week high. When markets last broke, in the 2022 inflation shock, Intel fell 52% against 24% for the S&P 500.
Shareholders have already been asked for more. In August 2026 Intel priced $20 billion of new stock at $95 a share, and it trades near $104.50 now. Debt is 9.5% of market value, so the balance sheet is not the pressure point. Dilution and the capital bill are.
The next checkpoint has a date. The 0.9 process design kit for 14A is due in October, and external foundry revenue is what would turn the fabs into a business other people buy.
So this is a genuinely hard call. You are paying a premium on sales for a company whose products work and whose factories do not pay for themselves yet, and the timetable that decides it runs to 2028.
If you cannot settle that, do not settle it here. Our five-factor stock scorecard ranks every stock on growth, profitability, stability, resilience, and valuation.
Buy It Or Fear It, How Much Of It Should You Own?
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