Can Intel Save America?

Intel's stock surged nearly 500 percent over the past year to an all-time high valuation above $600 billion, reversing a 16-year low as the company secured partnerships with Nvidia, Tesla, and Apple. The chipmaker's resurgence positions it as the only U.S. firm capable of competing with Taiwan's TSMC, a critical factor for national security and economic stability. The AI boom's shift toward central processing units, where Intel dominates, has driven the turnaround as CPUs regain relevance alongside Nvidia's GPUs.

A year ago Intel was left for dead, its stock at a 16-year low. Today, it’s the hottest stock on Wall Street, gaining almost 500 percent https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/05/27/up-nearly-500-in-1-year-can-intel-stock-keep-risin/ over the last year, leading to an all-time peak valuation in its 58-year history—surpassing $600 billion https://www.bitget.com/amp/news/detail/12560605403717 as it secures partnerships with a Who’s Who of tech titans led by Nvidia, Tesla, and Apple. But nice as it is for shareholders, the stock’s rise isn’t the real story. Intel’s comeback, if it sticks, could be hugely important for geopolitics and for securing America’s economy in the 21st century. Intel is the only American company remotely capable of competing with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company TSMC , its much larger rival in Taiwan. And among the reasons the stock is climbing is that the AI boom has reached a new stage, one where central processing units CPUs —the semiconductors that comprise the computer’s “brain”—are suddenly critically important again https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/cpu-agentic-ai-ca2c5582 . Intel has long been a dominant CPU manufacturer. The AI boom had primarily been built on a different kind of semiconductor known as graphics processing units GPUs , the graphics chips pioneered by Nvidia. GPUs split AI workloads into thousands of small tasks and work on them all at once. CPUs, built to do tasks consecutively, were considered increasingly irrelevant. “Somewhere along the way, people thought CPUs were dead,” Rene Haas, CEO of UK chip designer Arm, said back in March https://diginomica.com/shot-arm-humble-cpu-how-ai-increasing-awareness-why-silicon-matters-according-arm-ceo-rene-haas .