The Trump administration’s Intel (INTC) stake has grown into a $28 billion paper gain after Intel surged to a fresh all-time high.
Back on August 22, 2025, Cryptopolitan reported that the U.S. government had bought a 10% holding in Intel at $20.47 a share, a position worth about $8.9 billion at the time.
Now, after a huge run in the stock, that U.S. position is sitting on a gain of about 315%.
On Friday, Intel surged by 28% and traded as high as $85.22, setting a new record for the stock. The rally pushed Intel to its strongest one-day performance since October 29, 1987. It also lifted the stock’s gain for the year to about 120%.
Intel also climbed 22.6% in another reading that took it above the peak it reached during the dot-com era in 2000. Truly just… outstanding!
Intel turns strong earnings into a market shock
Yesterday, Cryptopolitan reported that Intel saw $13.58 billion in revenue for the quarter, beating the $12.42 billion that Wall Street expected. Earnings per share came in at $0.29, far above the $0.01 forecast.
Revenue was also up 7.2% from the $12.67 billion that Intel reported a year earlier. For the next quarter, Intel said it expects revenue between $13.8 billion and $14.8 billion in the second quarter. Analysts had been looking for about $13 billion.
And then of course, we’ve got the whole matter of Tesla and SpaceX picking Intel’s 14A process for the Terafab AI chip project. That gives Intel an outside customer for a future manufacturing node that the market is watching closely.
At the same time, Intel’s Data Center and AI business posted year-over-year growth. Those two things landed together. The foundry build-out is still expensive and still one of the biggest financial variables in the Intel story, but the new customer link gave traders another reason to bet on Intel in the near term.
For a long stretch, Intel looked like it was losing ground in the fight for AI hardware demand. Other chip companies got most of the attention, and Nvidia led much of that run. But perhaps that money is now flowing back into Intel in a serious way.
Intel lifts the whole chip sector as AI spending keeps rolling
The rally did not stop with Intel. U.S. chip stocks surged to new highs on Friday after Intel’s stronger-than-expected forecast boosted confidence in the wider AI trade.
The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose 3.2% to a record and was on track for its 18th straight day of gains. The index is now up more than 47% this year.
That broader rise has been tied to the spending binge from major tech companies building more AI infrastructure. Chip names have been among the biggest winners from that wave of spending. The earnings outlook shows how wide the gap has become.
The semiconductor group is expected to post 109.2% earnings growth for the first quarter, based on LSEG data. The wider S&P 500 information technology sector is expected to grow earnings by 48.2%. Both numbers are strong, but the chip group is in a different league.
Other stocks joined the Friday jump. AMD climbed 13.7%. Arm gained 12%. Nvidia, now the most valuable company in the world, added 1.6%. Last year, a lot of the rally in chip names came from demand for Nvidia’s graphics chips, which are used to train large AI models on huge piles of data.
Earlier this year, many AI and other Big Tech stocks came under pressure. Investors started asking whether all the spending would really turn into better revenue, fatter margins, and stronger cash flow soon enough.
Even with that concern, valuations have cooled from earlier extremes. The S&P 500 tech index now trades at about 22 times forward 12-month earnings, down from about 31.8 last year. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index was last around 26.6 times forward earnings, compared with about 20.7 times for the S&P 500.
