Intel shares climbed 25% over the last five days as demand for central processing units rises with the spread of agentic AI. CEO Lip-Bu Tan said at the AI Infra Summit that CPUs are in high demand for reinforcement learning, agentic AI, system-level orchestration, and their general-purpose usefulness, since CPUs are the chips that let AI agents navigate websites, shop online, and perform other tasks while GPUs run the underlying models. Intel is also reportedly expected to raise CPU prices 10%, according to Digitimes, and Meta's new Muse AI agent has drawn 2.5 million downloads since its Sept. 8 launch, per Sensor Tower. The company is pursuing a broader turnaround and building a third-party chip manufacturing business to compete with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, with Google having chosen Intel in June to make its custom Tensor Processing Units, Nvidia looking at Intel as a backup chip builder, and Reuters reporting SK Hynix is in talks with Intel to produce memory chips. Intel shares are up 159% over the last five months, 314% over the last 12 months.
Intel CorporationRising CPU demand from agentic AI and reinforcement learning drives Intel's core chip business.
SK Hynix Inc
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc
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NVIDIA Corporation
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