Shares of Intel fell 4.6% to $109.41 on June 1 even as the company unveiled a wave of data center products at the Computex trade show in Taiwan — a textbook "sell the news" reaction from investors who had already bid the stock up from under $19 to an all-time high of $132.45 in just twelve months.

  • A 288-Core Chip Lands, but the Next One Is Already Late. Intel launched its latest server processor featuring up to 288 cores, built on its most advanced 18A manufacturing process. Intel claims it beats AMD's competing chip by 1.3x in performance-per-watt. But Intel confirmed that its next-generation high-performance server chip has been delayed to 2027. That matters because AMD will have a head start with its next-gen server chips built on a competing process from TSMC, which are still on track for this year. Every quarter of delay is a quarter where Intel keeps losing server share.

  • Market Share Is Sliding Despite the Revenue Comeback. Intel's server CPU market share fell to 54.9% in Q1 2026 from 64.4% a year earlier, as AMD and Arm aggressively expanded. This is happening during a turnaround quarter in which the data center unit brought in $5.1 billion, a 22% year-over-year gain. Revenue is growing because the overall pie is expanding — driven by AI demand — but Intel is getting a smaller slice. Intel's Foundry business also still posted a $2.4 billion operating loss in Q1.

  • The Stock Had Already Priced In Good News — and Then Some. Intel has been one of the best-performing stocks in the entire market over the past year — up roughly 488% — fueled by restructuring, government investment, and the AI-driven CPU demand story. It carries a negative price-to-earnings ratio of about -183 , meaning the company still isn't profitable on a standard accounting basis. At these levels, investors need acceleration, not just new product launches that were already on the roadmap.

  • Agentic AI Is a Real Opportunity, but Intel Has Competition on Every Side. With the rise of AI agents that make dozens of requests to gather information and run code, CPUs are back in the spotlight — and Intel's new chip happens to have 288 of them. But that's 200 more cores than Nvidia's new server CPUs and more than twice as many as Arm's recently unveiled AI chip, both aimed squarely at this market. Intel's pitch is real, but it must execute against deep-pocketed rivals while its own next-generation product sits a year away.