Intel shares jump nearly 5% after New Street upgrades the stock to Buy

Intel shares rose 4.9% to a session high, with the stock trading near $93 after a Wall Street upgrade put the chipmaker back in the spotlight. The catalyst was New Street Research analyst Pierre Ferragu, who moved Intel from Neutral to Buy. For a company that spent years as the cautionary tale of American semiconductors, getting a Buy rating still feels a bit like a comeback tour. What New Street is betting on Ferragu set a price target of $125 on the stock. Measured against where shares were trading at the time, that implies a potential upside of around 38%. His core argument centers on server CPUs, the processors that run inside data center machines. Ferragu pointed to rising demand driven by agentic AI, meaning AI systems that carry out multi-step tasks on their own rather than just answering a single prompt. Ferragu expects this demand to keep supply tight for several years. He projected that Intel could expand its server capacity by more than 50% by 2027. The longer-range figure is bigger. Ferragu estimated that server CPU sales could reach $50 billion by 2030. A second upgrade in about a week New Street was not the first firm to warm up to Intel this month. On October 19, 202...