3. Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)
Stock Performance Since Trade Date: +135.06%
Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) is among Trump’s favorite AI picks and a stock he has taken a personal interest in. In just a matter of months, a beaten-down chip giant that Wall Street had largely written off became one of the market’s top performers, and Trump deserves a meaningful share of the credit. The U.S. government bought 433 million Intel shares at $20.47 each through a conversion of CHIPS Act grants into equity, giving Washington a 9.9% stake in Intel (NASDAQ:INTC). Trump also reportedly helped broker a preliminary deal between Intel and Apple, under which Intel’s 18A node would manufacture chips for iPad Pro and entry-level MacBook Air devices.
But beyond the Trump angle, Intel has genuine fundamental support. Bulls point to a structural change in how AI infrastructure is being built. The AI workload mix is rotating from training toward inference and agentic AI, shifting the architecture away from GPU-heavy clusters and back toward CPUs as the orchestration layer. Historically, the GPU-to-CPU ratio ran at 8:1 in training environments. For agentic AI, CEO Lip-Bu Tan says that ratio is moving toward 1:1 or even flipping CPU-heavy. Intel’s (NASDAQ:INTC) Data Center and AI segment grew 22% year over year in Q1 to $5.1 billion, with operating margins hitting 30.5%. Xeon 6 was selected as the host CPU for Nvidia’s DGX Rubin NVL8 systems, and Intel signed a long-term agreement with Google for Xeon processors to support Google Cloud workloads across AI training and inference. On the foundry side, the company has received close to $8.9 billion from the U.S. government and is now partnering with Tesla’s TeraFab consortium alongside SpaceX and xAI, with 18A yields improving at 7% per month.
Alpha Wealth Insiders Fund stated the following regarding Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) in its Q1 2026 investor letter:
“Despite poor fundamentals, we invested heavily in Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC), viewing its role as the sole U.S. defense silicon chip foundry as “too big to fail.” We profited handsomely, buying equal amounts at $23.98, $29.60, and $30.70 (August-September) and selling all on March 17th at $45.10. This Intel trade yielded an approximate annualized return of 133%. Intel has since risen to $62.38. I lost conviction when Nvidia’s CEO announced the $20 billion Groq acquisition to specifically compete with Intel in CPUs. Nvidia, a monopolist, is strategically using its capital, including owning Intel stock, for both blocking and seeding, even entering autonomous vehicle competition against its major customer, Tesla.”
