I have seen the Intel (INTC) comeback thesis several times this year. The foundry ambitions. The blowout Q2 fiscal 2026 earnings. The $15 billion equity raise. CEO Lip-Bu Tan’s methodical restructuring.
At its June 22 peak of $140.94, the stock had run 400% in a year and made believers out of even the most skeptical semiconductor analysts. Then came the hangover.
Yahoo Finance shows INTC at $95.80 as of this writing, down roughly 32% from that all-time high. Despite the drop, Intel is still up 159.62% year-to-date and 289.27% over the past year. Those numbers remain extraordinary, but the question now is whether the retracement has created a buying opportunity or a value trap.
Mizuho’s Vijay Rakesh, a 5-star-rated analyst ranked 12th out of 12,498 Wall Street analysts on TipRanks with a 64% success rate, just gave his analysis an answer.
He cut Intel’s price target to $92 from $109 while maintaining a Hold rating, according to a note shared with TheStreet. At $95, the stock is essentially trading at his target. To him, that is a “fairly valued” call, not a “sell everything” call.
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Why Rakesh cut Intel’s stock price target
Intel’s decline from its peak happened in three distinct phases, and understanding them helps us frame what Rakesh is actually saying.
First came the sector-wide rotation. Around early July, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley both warned that AI semiconductor valuations had outrun near-term demand. And of course, that triggered heavy selling across the chip sector and into hyperscalers.
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Second came the Q2 earnings reaction. The results themselves were extraordinary — $16.1 billion in revenue beat expectations by $1.8 billion, non-GAAP EPS of $0.42 nearly doubled estimates, DCAI grew 59% year over year to $6.3 billion, and Intel Foundry revenue hit $5.8 billion.
But the stock fell nearly 8% the next day after earnings, according to Yahoo Finance. Why? The GAAP diluted loss per share of $2.16 from restructuring charges spooked investors, and critically, there were no outside 18A customer commitments to validate the foundry-at-scale thesis.
Third came the $15 billion equity raise in August. Necessary for the infrastructure buildout, but the dilution hit existing shareholders hard and reminded the market that being a world-class foundry requires burning significant cash before the economics work.
What Rakesh still likes in Intel
A Hold from a 12th-ranked analyst is not a dismissal. Rakesh made specific positive calls inside his notes that are worth understanding.
On AI server demand: he expects CPU-to-GPU ratios to improve from 1:4 today to potentially 1:1 over the long term as agentic AI scales. Intel’s server CPU supply remains tight and could stay constrained through 2027, meaning the company may continue to undersupply demand for several quarters. That is a revenue-protection argument at exactly the moment investors are most nervous.
On the foundry business: Rakesh projects Intel’s advanced packaging revenue growing to approximately $3.5 billion by 2029, supported by external customers including Google’s TPU program and potentially automakers and PC players.
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External foundry revenue could reach a separate $3.5 billion by 2029 as the 14A node gains traction. Together, those two streams could approach 4% of Intel’s fiscal 2029 revenue under conservative estimates.
On the PC cycle: he sees corporate refresh demand beginning to show up, corroborated by Dell’s recent commentary. Memory tightness may slow upgrades into 2027, but early signs of improvement are present.
The Q2 foundation and what the market is still wrestling with
The Q2 2026 results, reported July 23, remain the clearest picture of where Intel’s business actually stands, according to Intel’s earnings release.
DCAI segment generated $6.3 billion in revenue, up 59% year over year. Foundry revenue grew 31% to $5.8 billion. Intel 18A-P entered risk production on schedule.
Also Read: Intel Corporation Latest News and Stories
Panther Lake processors entered high-volume manufacturing using ASML’s EXE High NA EUV technology. CEO Lip-Bu Tan called Q2 “our strongest revenue growth in more than fifteen years.”
The market is discounting the timeline between today’s results and profitable outside foundry scale. The Apple preliminary chip agreement, the Google cloud partnership expansion, and the preliminary customer conversations on 18A are encouraging signals. But preliminary agreements are not committed revenue, and the $15 billion equity raise is a reminder of what the path costs.
Wall Street’s current consensus among 31 analysts covering Intel in the past 3 months is 5 buys, 24 holds, and 2 sells, with an average price target of $116.16, according to TheStreet. Rakesh at $92 is at the cautious end of that range.
If you believe the agentic AI CPU thesis and the foundry optionality play out on schedule, the 32% discount from the June high looks like an opportunity.
If you are waiting for outside 18A customer commitments and margin improvement before buying, Rakesh’s “fairly valued for now” framing is the more disciplined stand. Both positions are defensible. The gap between them closes when we see concrete foundry customers signed.
