Bank of America Bank upgraded Intel to Buy from Underperform on Monday and lifted its price target to $135 from $96, sending the chipmaker up 5.1% in morning trading. The move was a rare double upgrade and gave fresh sell-side backing to a stock that had already been leaning on the idea that Intel’s manufacturing turnaround can work.
Investors were searching for a reason to believe that story because Intel has been trading as much on future production wins as on what it has already shipped. The upgrade arrived after reports that Google planned to have Intel produce more than three million TPUs in 2028, a development that, if it holds, would be one of the clearest signs yet that Intel Foundry is winning real external business. Analyst Vivek Arya said stronger server CPU demand tied to agentic AI workloads also supports the bull case.
Arya’s new target is the latest and boldest signal from Wall Street that Intel’s foundry pitch is gaining traction. Intel’s data center and AI business rose 22% to $5.1 billion in Q1 2026, and the company’s revenue of $13.58 billion beat consensus by about $1.16 billion. For a stock that had 51 moves greater than 5% over the last year, the reaction underscored how quickly traders still reprice Intel when a large bank puts numbers behind the turnaround narrative.
But the Google angle remains far from settled. JPMorgan has argued the chips may still be fabricated at TSMC, with Intel handling packaging only, which would make the reported arrangement a narrower win than the market is assuming. Nvidia is also running early multi-project wafer tests on Intel’s 18A process for a multi-die GPU design tied to its Feynman architecture, but it has not placed a production order. Neither Google nor Intel has officially confirmed the deal.
That leaves Intel in the same position it has been in for months: the stock can move hard on every new hint of foundry progress, but the biggest prize is still unconfirmed. If Google eventually puts real production volume through Intel, Bank of America Bank’s upgrade may look early rather than aggressive. If it does not, Monday’s jump may end up being another sharp trade in a name that still needs proof, not just promise.
