The stock market soared last month, as the S&P 500 (^GSPC 0.74%) index gained 10.4% in April. But some stocks rose even higher. For example, Intel (INTC +4.29%) shares rose 114.1% in April 2026, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.
It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes several catalysts to double a classic semiconductor stock in 30 days or less. On the other hand, all of Intel's tailwinds can be traced back to the ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) boom.
NASDAQ: INTC
Key Data Points
Intel's April hat trick of good news
In my eyes, Intel's April run boils down to three separate (but related) events:
- On April 9, Intel's Foundry-branded chip manufacturing services scored a couple of massive wins. The unit signed a long-term partnership with Tesla (TSLA 0.03%), making Intel a founding partner of the upcoming Terafab chip-making facility. At the same time, Alphabet (GOOG 0.76%) (GOOGL 0.69%) committed to using Intel Xeon processors and jointly developed accelerators in Google Cloud's AI operations. Intel's stock rose 10.5% that week.
- The big boom came on April 23, when Intel crushed Wall Street's targets in its first-quarter report. Revenue grew 7% year over year to $13.6 billion while earnings swung to an adjusted profit of $0.29 per share. Analysts had expected earnings near $0.02 per share on sales in the neighborhood of $12.4 billion. The Data Center and AI division posted 22% revenue growth; Foundry sales increased by 16%. Intel's stock skyrocketed 23.6% the next day.
- Finally, Intel confirmed that demand for AI chips is so high that customers are paying top dollar for chips that failed parts of the quality testing. The company can disable chip sections with significant manufacturing errors and still find customers willing to pay a premium for the working sections. In other words, Intel is making money from imperfect wafers formerly destined for the scrap heap. This revelation was good for another 12.1% stock jump on April 29.
After a 400% rally, Intel stock is still a relative bargain
Intel's turnaround effort is paying off. As of this writing on May 4, the stock has bounced 412% from the 52-week lows of May 2025. The stock has outperformed arch rivals (and fellow market-beaters) Advanced Micro Devices (AMD +3.93%) and Nvidia (NVDA 3.58%) over the last year:
Even so, Intel's stock is priced at 9.0 times trailing sales while AMD and Nvidia trade at 16.0 and 30.3 times sales, respectively. I'm a happy shareholder as Intel's changing business plan helps it capitalize on unprecedented chip demand from AI customers.
Image source: Intel.
It took Intel's stock more than 25 years to eclipse the all-time peak prices of the dot-com era, but now it's done.
And I expect the success story to continue from here.
