Intel is poised to break into the top 10 most valuable companies and join the coveted $1T club as the AI boom shows no signs of abating.
During the recent Q1 earnings call, CEO Lip-Bu Tan highlighted that the ratio of GPU to CPU has gone from 1:8 to 1:4, and in some cases 1:1. This remarkable transition is largely attributed to the shift from model training to inference, catapulted by agentic AI.
The CPU market’s total addressable market (TAM) is expected to be 120b-170b by 2030, based on estimates provided by AMD and UBS. ARM, whose
main business was in the provision of CPU IPs - separate from the x86 IP of Intel and AMD - has now pivoted to design the ARM AGI CPU chip to capture a slice of the huge CPU TAM.
Since last year in Mar 2025 when CEO Lip-Bu Tan took over the reigns at Intel, the company has undergone a massive transformation. Some of these changes included the reduction in middle management, a return to an engineering-centric culture, the hiring of key talents into senior management and industry experts working on the bleeding edge, deals with the US Government, Elon Musk’s Terafab and now Apple. The stock has moved from the low $20 to an all time high at $127, a parabolic move that has defied all expectations.
Looking ahead, the race to pole position to unseat NVIDA is underway. But first, Intel will have to break into the $1T club where only 13 companies have achieved this vaunted status. Can Intel do it? It’s no longer a matter of if, but a question of when.
