After holding $INTC for three years, I can tell you for sure that there will be a number of rumours/talks/headlines about Intel’s potential deals. This happened a lot in the past and will surely continue to occur in the future. Those are noise you just have to ignore sometimes. But there are some indisputable facts about the company that I consider are the bases for my long term holding:
(1) it’s a bipartisan goal to make Intel foundry great so that US will not depend on Taiwan. Be it government equity investment or Chips Act policies. This goal will not be changed for the decade to come (unless IFS surpasses TSMC within the next a few years in terms of volumes, which I doubt). This goal will not be changed no matter who is the president or controls the senate/house.
(2) Intel is the ONLY US leading semi IP holder and will remain so. TSMC does not and will not have US IPs that are superior than their Taiwan HQs. This is required by Taiwanese government and laws. This is also the basis of so-called silicon shield that Taiwan wants to maintain to leverage US power to defend itself against China. For this reason, Terafab has to work with Intel, unless @elonmusk just wanted to build it as a second-class fab using TSMC inferior IPs, which I highly doubt.
(3) Intel has gone through several reorganization efforts - cut layers of middle management, brought in cost efficiency, changed the customer service culture, etc. Under Lip bu and current management’s leadership, Intel is ready to take advantage of opportunities.
(4) The opportunities are the AI compute shortage and CPU playing central roles in agentic AI. As AI chips are becoming larger, TSMC is now catching up on Intel’s EMIB packaging technologies. With the booming business in CPUs, advanced packaging and success of 14A, we will see foundry business to be profitable next year. This is not to mention the potential surprises from the memory and optical and ASIC business …
Still holding a 50% position in $INTW. Slightly regret not adding yesterday. For $INTC, I’m still waiting for an entry at $110 or below.
Musk’s latest comments largely rule out the worst-case scenario of TSMC taking over Terafab and Intel being sidelined.