INTC Climbs 12% on BofA's Rare Double Upgrade to Buy, $135 Target

A Double Upgrade, Not a Nudge

The move has a single, clean catalyst: on June 11, Bank of America's Vivek Arya took Intel from Underperform straight to Buy, skipping the usual Neutral waystation and lifting his price target to $135 from $96. Double upgrades are rare for a reason — analysts almost never reverse a sell call in one step — and the size of the estimate revision behind it is the real tell. BofA now sees Intel capable of more than $6 in earnings per share by 2030, up from a prior $3-to-$4 range.

Arya's stated logic is two-pronged: higher confidence that Intel can help relieve industry constraints in leading-edge wafers and advanced packaging, and a larger addressable market as AI workloads shift toward agentic computing, where CPUs do more of the work. Worth keeping honest: even after this move, a $135 target sits only modestly above the ~$125 print. The upgrade re-rates the story; it does not promise much more multiple expansion from here on the analyst's own math.

The Foundry Bet Underneath It

What gives the upgrade teeth is the foundry line. BofA models Intel Foundry revenue climbing from about $1.1 billion in 2026 to $47.1 billion by 2030, driven by external wafers, advanced packaging, and named engagements spanning Apple, MediaTek TPU work, and Terafab.

That forecast is not hanging in the air. Days earlier, reports surfaced that Google and Nvidia tapped Intel as a backup manufacturer for advanced processors while TSMC runs swamped — including a Google order to build more than 3 million Tensor Processing Units at Intel fabs for 2028 production. If those orders convert, they fill capacity, spread fixed fab costs, and serve as third-party validation of Intel's 18A and 14A nodes — exactly the data points a foundry-revenue ramp needs to be believable rather than aspirational.

Priced for a Turnaround

Context matters here: this is not a name climbing off the floor. Intel is up roughly 210% year to date and tracking its best annual run since 1975. The bull case for more upside leans on positioning — at a market cap north of $540 billion, Intel still sat in only about 16% of S&P 500 fund portfolios as of May, meaning a lot of money is underweight a stock that keeps working.

The other side is just as visible. A 200%-plus run leaves the tape exposed to profit-taking, the foundry thesis is an execution story that plays out over years rather than quarters, and the freshly raised target implies single-digit upside from current levels. For perp traders, the HIP-3 INTC market turned over about $96 million in the last 24 hours — enough depth to express a view, but a re-rate this far along cuts both ways.