American semiconductor company that once set the pace of technological progress. Gordon Moore, one of its founders, predicted in 1965 that chips would get faster and cheaper with metronomic consistency; over the decades Intel brought Moore's Law to life, designing and building the processors that powered servers and personal computers.
Intel has missed nearly every big shift in its industry over the past two decades. It failed to profit from the rise of smartphones, was slow to adopt advanced lithography tools and has largely sat out the boom in artificial intelligence. Between 2021 and 2024 revenue dropped by a third, from nearly $80bn to just over $50bn; in 2024 it made a net loss of almost $20bn. Over the five years to mid-2025 its market value fell by roughly half, to around $100bn. TSMC, which has stolen Intel's crown as the world's leading chip manufacturer, is worth ten times as much.
Throughout its history Intel has both designed and built its own chips. That integration let it use its manufacturing prowess to deliver better products even when its designs lagged behind. From the mid-2010s, however, repeated missteps in manufacturing saw it fall behind TSMC. Deprived of that advantage, Intel's processors became uncompetitive with those from AMD, a long-term rival which had given up on manufacturing. In 2021 Intel began outsourcing production of its most advanced chips to TSMC.
As recently as 2019 Intel controlled 84% of the global market for PC chips and 94% for servers. By 2024 those figures had fallen to 69% and 62%, respectively. AMD, using the x86 architecture pioneered by Intel, has developed better chips. Cloud giants such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft now design their own processors using outlines from Arm, a British company owned by SoftBank. In December 2024 Amazon said that half the server capacity it added in the preceding two years used its own silicon.
Pat Gelsinger, Intel's boss from 2021 to 2024, split design and manufacturing into two units, allowing the product arm to shop around for the best manufacturer while opening Intel's chip factories to outsiders. To build a contract-chipmaking business he set about spending $90bn on new fabs in four American states, tapping private equity and securing nearly $8bn in subsidies under America's CHIPS Act. But the plan was thrown into disarray by technical problems at the foundry, which deterred external customers, and falling sales at the design arm.
Intel's newest "18A" process incorporates transistors that are ahead of TSMC's, as well as a novel way of feeding power through the back of the chip to save space and energy. SemiAnalysis, a consultancy, reckons Intel will need to invest a bit over $50bn between 2025 and 2027 to make its foundry competitive in leading-edge manufacturing.
Lip-Bu Tan took over as chief executive in March 2025 after Gelsinger was sacked. At the end of 2024 Intel employed 109,000 people, nearly as many as Nvidia and TSMC combined. Tan plans to cut the workforce by a quarter by the end of 2025. He scrapped fab projects in Germany and Poland and pushed construction of Intel's advanced fabs in Ohio back to the early 2030s. On AI, Tan believes Intel should focus not on designing chips for training models but on inference, the task of running them.
In August 2025 Donald Trump demanded Tan's resignation, citing his links to China, only to praise him four days later after a meeting. Reports surfaced that the government was pursuing a 9.9% stake in the company, which would make it Intel's largest shareholder. SoftBank announced it would invest $2bn in the company. In September 2025 Nvidia invested $5bn in Intel as part of a deal to boost its beleaguered rival.
Evercore, an investment bank, reckons Intel's design arm might be worth more than $100bn on its own. Intel's share price rose by 50% after the state took its stake.
Demand for central-processing units (CPUs) has been so robust that it has breathed new life into Intel, one of the leading producers of CPUs. "Agentic" AI tools, which plan, reason and carry out tasks, rely more heavily on CPUs to co-ordinate their work; Morgan Stanley estimates that agentic systems require one CPU for every GPU, compared with a ratio of one to 12 for chatbot-style systems. Intel's market capitalisation more than doubled over the six months to May 2026.
If you sow your wild oats, hope for a crop failure.