TLDR
- Analyst Trip Chowdhry sees Intel hitting $200, citing 16x year-over-year CPU demand growth driven by AI workloads
- Dell’s traditional server revenue jumped 122% year-over-year, which Chowdhry links directly to Intel CPU adoption
- Intel’s Clearwater Forest chip leads rivals with 576 cores vs AMD’s 192 and Nvidia’s 88
- Intel’s latest quarterly earnings beat expectations with EPS of $0.42 vs $0.21 consensus, revenue up 25.2% YoY
- CEO Lip-Bu Tan bought nearly $10 million of INTC stock at $95 per share in August
Intel stock opened at $91.67 on Friday, up over 3.6% on the day, as a fresh analyst note tied Dell’s blowout earnings directly to rising demand for Intel CPUs.
Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry published a note arguing Dell’s latest earnings call is direct proof that Intel CPU demand is accelerating fast. The note puts a $200 price target on INTC, backed by a 2031 EPS estimate of $20.
The core of Chowdhry’s argument is a 16-fold year-over-year jump in CPU demand, driven by AI training workloads shifting from text to heavier media like video, images, and audio. Video and audio processing is far more compute-heavy, and CPUs are picking up more of that load alongside GPUs.
Dell COO Jeff Clarke gave Chowdhry the data points he needed. On Dell’s earnings call, Clarke said the company is seeing “demand for new servers that have more cores” and described “a growing trend of customers that require meaningful CPU compute capacity to support AI and agentic workflows.”
Clarke also confirmed traditional server revenue “was up 122% as demand remains exceptionally strong.” Chowdhry’s note put it bluntly: “This is INTC CPUs.”
The CPU-to-GPU Shift
The structural case behind the $200 target rests on a changing ratio between CPUs and GPUs in AI server racks. Two generations ago, one CPU could handle eight GPUs. Today, two to four CPUs are needed to keep pace with just one GPU or TPU. That alone implies a major jump in CPU unit demand per rack, before any Intel market share gains even enter the picture.
Intel’s Clearwater Forest processor sits at the top of the core-count table. It offers 576 cores compared to AMD’s Turin Dense at 192 and Nvidia’s Vera Rubin at 88, which started shipping in August 2026. Chowdhry frames Nvidia’s CPU products as “GPU Controllers” rather than direct CPU competition.
Two more technical edges add to Intel’s case. High-end GPUs are capped at 80 to 192 gigabytes of HBM memory, while Intel x86 servers support terabytes of system DRAM, an advantage for large language model inference. Intel’s AMX instruction set also lets x86 CPUs run matrix multiplication directly on-chip, enabling real-time inference on midsize LLMs without a discrete GPU.
Intel’s Recent Results
Intel’s most recent quarterly report gave the bull case some real numbers to work with. The company posted EPS of $0.42, doubling the $0.21 consensus estimate. Revenue came in at $16.13 billion, up 25.2% year-over-year and well above the $14.43 billion estimate.
More than 70% of existing enterprise data centers run on x86 infrastructure, giving Intel a large installed base and a low switching cost advantage.
CEO Lip-Bu Tan backed the stock with his own money in August, purchasing 105,263 shares at $95 each for a total of just under $10 million. Intel has set Q3 2026 EPS guidance at $0.38.
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