Intel stock surges 25% in 5 days on rising CPU demand

Intel just had its best five-day stretch in recent memory. Shares of the chipmaker climbed roughly 25% from $97.14 on September 15 to $121.78 on September 21, 2026, with the final session alone delivering a 12.14% pop. The catalyst: a sudden, tangible spike in consumer CPU demand, driven largely by Meta’s AI agent app “Muse,” which topped the US iOS App Store’s free-app charts for three consecutive days. The move wasn’t just an Intel story. It rippled across the entire CPU sector, lifting Arm Holdings by more than 13% and AMD by roughly 9-10% on the same day Intel surged hardest. AMD, for its part, crossed a milestone of its own, hitting a $1 trillion market valuation for the first time. Nvidia, meanwhile, sat this rally out, with its stock relatively flat during the same period. Intel’s supply problem is Wall Street’s opportunity The most striking data point came from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who dropped a bombshell at Splunk’s .conf26 conference. Intel, he said, is currently fulfilling only about 50% of customer CPU orders. Intel is clearly betting on this demand persisting. The company raised its full-year capital expenditure forecast to $20 billion, up from an earlier estimate of ...