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The race for semiconductor supremacy has taken an unexpected turn. High-profile names are now increasingly backing Intel (INTC) over its arch-rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
Veteran investor Paul Pelosi – former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s spouse – recently revealed a multi-million-dollar position in INTC through long-dated call options.
And former hedge fund manager Jim Cramer has also dubbed Intel stock his top AI chip pick for 2026. These big-ticket endorsements arrive on the heels of the company’s remarkable 220% year-to-date rally.
Why Intel stock may be a better pick than AMD
The core differentiator making INTC stock a more compelling long-term bet than AMD lies in its dual identity as both a chip designer and a contract manufacturer.
While AMD operates entirely on a fabless model – leaving it heavily exposed to geopolitical risks through its near-total reliance on Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) – Intel is building a “localized” supply chain.
Fueled by heavy federal subsidies and strategic investments from giants like Nvidia and SoftBank, Intel Foundry is rapidly scaling its advanced 18A nodes domestically.
This positioning turns Intel Corp into a crucial sovereign foundry – providing a geopolitical safety net and multi-year revenue pipelines that pure-play designers like AMD completely lack.
INTC shares let you play AI from a different angle
AMD has focused heavily on chasing Nvidia in the fiercely competitive artificial intelligence GPU arena but Intel is capitalizing on a structural market shift: the industry pivot from AI model training to execution, known as inference.
As enterprise AI workloads transition toward continuous orchestration, agentic software, and edge consumer devices, high-performance central processing units (CPUs) have become critical gating factors.
Intel maintains a dominant market share in the global server and PC CPU ecosystems.
Backed by major architecture wins – including its Xeon processors being selected to host Nvidia’s own flagship hardware – Intel shares are exceptionally positioned to capture massive, high-margin inference infrastructure spend.
How high can Intel realistically fly in 2026?
That said, INTC shares are weathering an aggressive sell-off today – down roughly 8% at the time of writing along-side a broader tech pullback.
But the weakness is structural – not fundamental, driven by mechanical quarter-end institutional rebalancing and short-term profit-taking after yesterday’s tech surge.
For long-term investors, this temporary dip presents a textbook buying opportunity to acquire a core AI infrastructure asset at a discount.
With massive enterprise architectural upgrades underway, agentic AI deployment scaling rapidly, and the firm’s innovative 18A-P process node heading toward commercialization, buying today’s dip allows retail investors to mirror elite institutional positioning at a more attractive entry price.
Note that Cantor Fitzgerald analysts recently raised their price target on Intel Corp to $150, which signals potential upside of another 17% from current levels.
However, the stock remains unsuitable for income-focused investors as it doesn’t currently pay a dividend.
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