Key points
- Intel (INTC) was the comeback story of 2026, up about 278% in the first half on a foundry turnaround investors had left for dead.
- The rally rests on real progress: its 18A factory process is working, the U.S. government and Nvidia have put billions in, and data center revenue is growing again.
- Rival AMD (AMD) rose about 171% on the same theme. Both make a point the market forgot: in the AI data center, the CPU still matters.
The AI story has been told as one thing for two years now. Buy the GPU makers. Buy Nvidia. Everything else is a footnote.
So here is a surprise from the first half of 2026. Two of the biggest winners were not GPU companies at all. They were the old CPU names. Intel came back from the dead. AMD kept grinding higher. Between them, they prove something the market had stopped believing. The plain processor at the center of every computer still matters.
The stock everyone had written off
For years, Intel (INTC) was the value trap of big tech. It fell behind on manufacturing. It lost server market share to AMD. It burned cash trying to build a factory business from scratch. By late 2025 most investors had simply moved on.
Then the stock did something nobody expected. It rose about 278 percent in the first half of 2026, from roughly $37 at the end of 2025 to about $140 by the end of June. That made it one of the biggest winners of the half, behind only Micron (MU) among the major AI names. It has cooled since, trading near $128 in early July, but the move was real. We covered the full first-half board in our AI stock scoreboard.
What actually changed: the factory
The turnaround is about one thing above all. Intel's factories started working again.
Its new manufacturing process, called 18A, is roughly a 2-nanometer-class node. That is a measure of how small and advanced the transistors are, and smaller usually means faster and more efficient. Intel is using 18A to build its new Panther Lake chips, and it calls the process the most advanced ever made in the United States. Just as important, the yields are improving. Yield is the share of chips on each wafer that come out usable, and CEO Lip-Bu Tan said Intel is now seeing gains of 7 to 8 percent a month. Tan, who took over in 2025, has called the foundry a "national treasure."
The money followed. The U.S. government put about $5.7 billion into Intel and took an equity stake of around 10 percent. Nvidia invested $5 billion. SoftBank added $2 billion. Then came customers. Intel signed foundry deals with Tesla and Google, and it is in talks with Apple about building some of its chips. Management expects more customer commitments in the second half of the year.
Intel is buying talent, too. In June 2026 it hired Seok-Hee Lee, the former CEO of Korean memory giant SK Hynix, to run a new advanced-packaging group inside Intel Foundry and report straight to Tan. Advanced packaging is the craft of stacking and wiring several chips into one, and it has become one of the most important steps in building an AI processor. Lee helped make SK Hynix a leader in high-bandwidth memory, the exact part fueling Micron's run. He also spent a decade at Intel earlier in his career. Bringing him back says Intel is serious about the parts of chipmaking that matter most for AI.
The reason this matters is simple. Almost every advanced chip in the world is made by one company, Taiwan's TSMC (TSM), and it is swamped. A working leading-edge factory on U.S. soil gives big tech a second option. That is worth a lot, to customers and to Washington.
The business under the stock
It helps to separate the story from the numbers. Intel is improving, but it is not fixed.
In the first quarter of 2026, revenue rose 7 percent to $13.6 billion and beat Wall Street estimates. Data center and AI sales climbed 22 percent to about $5 billion. The foundry unit is still losing money, though the loss narrowed to $2.4 billion in the quarter. And the full payoff is years out. Tan has said the next process, 14A, is aimed at volume production in 2029. So this is a real turn, but a slow one, and the stock is now priced for a lot of it to go right.
AMD ran the same race, and kept winning share
AMD (AMD) was the other big CPU winner, up about 171 percent in the first half before easing to around $548 in early July. Its story is less about a rescue and more about steady gains.
AMD keeps taking server market share from Intel. Its EPYC server processors reached about 33 percent of server chip shipments in early 2026, up from about 27 percent a year earlier, and they now bring in over 40 percent of all server CPU revenue. Cloud giants keep choosing AMD for their most demanding work and paying up for it.
On top of that, AMD has become the market's favorite bet against Nvidia's grip on AI chips. Its data center sales jumped 57 percent to $5.8 billion in the first quarter. Its MI350 accelerators are ramping, and the bigger MI400 line is due in the second half of the year. The demand is showing up in deals. AMD signed a multi-gigawatt supply agreement with OpenAI, and Meta committed up to 6 gigawatts of AMD gear in a multi-year deal reported at around $60 billion. Buyers want a second supplier, and AMD is it.
Why the CPU still matters
Here is the part the GPU obsession missed. AI does not run on GPUs alone.
Every cluster of AI chips needs a CPU next to it, doing the job it has always done. The CPU is the manager. It collects the data, routes it where it needs to go, and decides what happens next. The GPU does the heavy math, but the CPU runs the room.
That job is getting bigger, not smaller. The new wave of "agentic" AI, meaning software that plans and takes actions on its own, leans harder on the CPU to coordinate all of it. Pairing the CPU and GPU tightly also cuts delays and saves power, which matters when a data center's power bill is the real limit. So the boring processor turns out to be essential plumbing. That is why two CPU companies could ride the AI wave in a year when Nvidia itself gained only about 7 percent.
It is not a settled fight, though. AMD is still taking share from Intel. Arm-based chips from the cloud giants are pushing in too. The CPU matters, but who sells the winning one is very much up for grabs.
The bottom line
Intel's comeback is one of the stories of the year, and it is built on something concrete. The factories are getting better and the money and customers are showing up. But the foundry still loses money, the big wins are years away, and the stock has already run a long way. A signed Apple deal would be the kind of proof that keeps it going.
AMD is the cleaner grower, riding server share and a real number-two spot in AI chips, with the MI400 ramp as the next test. Both stocks have cooled from their highs, and none of this is a forecast. But the lesson of the first half is worth keeping. In an AI world fixated on GPUs, the plain old CPU still runs the show, and the companies that make it just had a very good six months. You can follow every new filing from these companies on our filings page.
Nothing here is investment advice. Performance figures are price returns from the December 31, 2025 close through the June 30, 2026 close, and intraday prices are as of early July 1, 2026 and move fast. Do your own research.
