Intel price target raised

TD Cowen just moved Intel’s price target to $60 on April 10, 2026, even though Intel spent most of the last few years being treated as the chip company that missed the artificial intelligence boom. The surprise is that the new bullish case is not mainly about flashy graphics chips, but about old-fashioned server processors suddenly getting scarce. (marketbeat.com) A server processor is the general-purpose brain inside a data-center machine. Even when a graphics chip does the heavy artificial intelligence math, the central processing unit still runs the operating system, moves data around, and coordinates the job. (intel.com) That matters because cloud companies are building artificial intelligence infrastructure at a pace that is straining more than one part of the supply chain. Intel said on January 22, 2026 that its conviction in the role of central processing units in the artificial intelligence era was growing, and its fourth-quarter 2025 results showed server and networking revenue growing double digits year over year and quarter over quarter. (intc.com) The bottleneck in this story is manufacturing capacity. A foundry is the factory that prints chips onto silicon wafers, and many chip designers rely on outside foundries instead of owning enough leading-edge factories themselves. (intc.com) Intel is unusual because it still designs many of its own processors and manufactures a large share of them in its own network. Intel’s annual filing says it is also trying to turn that manufacturing network into a world-class foundry business for outside customers, which means its factory footprint is now part of the investment argument, not just the product story. (intc.com) The firm on the other side of this trade is Advanced Micro Devices, which has been taking server share from Intel for years with its EPYC line. Mercury Research data reported in March 2026 showed Advanced Micro Devices reaching 41.3% of server central processing unit revenue share in the fourth quarter of 2025, which helps explain why any pause in its supply can quickly change sentiment around Intel. (techpowerup.com) The new wrinkle is that outside foundries appear tight enough that customers may not be able to get every server chip they want from fabless suppliers on their preferred schedule. Channel reporting published in April 2026 said Advanced Micro Devices server central processing unit availability was tightening for 2026 planning because wafer commitments were being pulled by custom processors and artificial intelligence accelerators. (fusionww.com) If that squeeze is real, Intel does not need to become the best chip company overnight to benefit. It only needs cloud buyers to say yes to more Xeon systems because Xeon is available now, qualified already, and good enough for workloads that cannot wait six months. (intel.com) That is why Intel’s April 9, 2026 announcement with Google Cloud matters in this context. Intel said Google Cloud will keep using Xeon processors across artificial intelligence, inference, and general-purpose workloads, which is the kind of large customer commitment analysts look for when they are deciding whether a supply-constrained market can translate into real revenue. (intel.com) There is still a catch. Intel’s own fourth-quarter 2025 earnings materials said first-quarter 2026 guidance reflected internal supply constraints, so the company is not walking into a market with infinite spare capacity either. (sec.gov) So the call behind the $60 target is narrower than “Intel is back.” It is closer to “the market may be underestimating how much money Intel can make when artificial intelligence demand turns server processors into a supply game, and Intel happens to own more of its own factories than the rivals taking share from it.” (streetinsider.com)