Intel shares jumped 3.7% in afternoon trading after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. reported a 58% surge in quarterly profit and forecast more strong sales ahead. The move pushed intc to $68.25 a share, a new 52-week high.
TSMC posted a record first-quarter net profit of $18.1 billion, up 58.3% from a year earlier, and said demand for advanced computing chips used in AI applications was still climbing. For investors, that made the world’s largest contract chipmaker a fresh read on the direction of the semiconductor market, and Intel caught the tailwind.
The latest pop added to a stock that has already been moving hard. Intel is up 73.3% since the beginning of the year and has logged 43 moves greater than 5% over the last year, a reminder that this name has become one of the market’s sharper trading vehicles.
The rally also builds on news from nine days earlier, when Intel gained 2.9% after announcing a major partnership with Elon Musk’s Terafab project and after KeyBanc lifted its price target from $65 to $70. Under that deal, Intel would provide design and packaging expertise for a facility intended to produce one terawatt of computing power annually for AI and robotics.
Analysts have also pointed to demand for Intel’s new Panther Lake processors and improving manufacturing yields on its 18A process. That has helped explain why the stock has kept climbing, even if the market’s reaction so far looks more like a vote of confidence in the story around Intel than a clean verdict on the business itself.
TSMC’s results matter beyond one company because the chipmaker is a major supplier to tech giants such as Apple and Nvidia, and its earnings are often treated as a barometer for the broader semiconductor industry. With that backdrop, Intel’s latest gain looks less like a one-day anomaly and more like a stock that is still being pulled higher by the same AI-chip demand that has reshaped the sector.
For now, the market is rewarding Intel for being in the middle of that trade. The question is whether the next leg higher comes from another industry tailwind, or from evidence that the company can turn all this enthusiasm into something more durable.