Bank of America recently upgraded Intel’s investment rating to Buy and raised its price target from US$96 to US$135. This not only reflects Wall Street’s reassessment of Intel’s future growth prospects, but also suggests that investors are beginning to re-evaluate the semiconductor veteran’s strategic value and earnings potential in the AI era.

Over the past several years, the market’s focus on Intel has largely centered on its manufacturing process delays, loss of market share, and the persistent losses within its foundry business. As a result, investors may have underestimated the long-term opportunities embedded in Intel’s server CPU and advanced semiconductor manufacturing businesses.

As the company’s technology roadmap becomes increasingly clear, product competitiveness continues to improve, and external customer orders gradually materialize, Intel’s earnings potential over the coming years could substantially exceed previous market expectations.

In the server CPU business, Bank of America is particularly optimistic about Intel’s prospects. The firm expects Intel’s server CPU revenue to exceed US$40 billion by 2030, representing approximately 25% of the global server processor market, which is projected to reach around US$170 billion.

Compared with the market’s current focus on the importance of GPUs in artificial intelligence, Bank of America believes that the future development of AI infrastructure will not be driven solely by GPUs. Instead, CPUs and GPUs are expected to evolve in a complementary manner.

The emergence of Agentic AI could become a major growth driver for Intel.

As artificial intelligence evolves from simple large-model inference toward intelligent agent systems capable of autonomous decision-making, autonomous execution, and multi-agent collaboration, the importance of CPUs could rise once again.

In the future, CPUs will not only handle traditional server management and resource scheduling tasks, but will also be responsible for coordinating communication, scheduling, permission management, and complex workflow orchestration among large numbers of AI agents.

Bank of America estimates that the CPU market associated with Agentic AI alone could reach US$70 billion by 2030. Given Intel’s long-established ecosystem advantages, the company is expected to capture significant value from this opportunity.

Beyond the CPU business, Intel’s foundry operation is viewed as another key factor that could drive future valuation expansion.

As global demand for a more diversified semiconductor supply chain continues to grow and the strategic importance of advanced domestic manufacturing in the United States increases, Intel is entering what may be an unprecedented period of opportunity.

Potential catalysts include the possibility of Apple shifting part of its future M-series chip production, orders for MediaTek AI TPU products, and growing demand for ARM-based data center CPU manufacturing services.

If these projects are successfully secured, they could significantly strengthen investor confidence in the long-term sustainability of Intel’s foundry business.

Market Analysis:

As Intel’s financial performance continues to improve and investors increasingly embrace its growth narrative, both passive investment flows and actively managed funds may gradually increase their allocations to the stock.

Once institutional investors begin rebuilding positions, incremental capital inflows could become an important catalyst for further gains in Intel’s share price.