INTC Clears $97 as Evercore Resets the Street High to $111 on a CPU Renaissance Call

Evercore Resets the Street High

The defining input on Tuesday is Evercore ISI moving Intel to Outperform with a $111 price target, up from a $45 In Line — a 146% target hike that resets the published street high above KeyBanc's $110 from last week. Analyst Mark Lipacis framed the call around three legs: AI-driven CPU demand, sharper execution under Lip-Bu Tan, and a U.S.-onshore foundry tailwind that the market still discounts. The number that matters in the note is the claim that the fastest-growing AI workloads can flip the historical CPU-to-GPU spend ratio from roughly 1:8 toward 8:1 as agentic stacks plan, orchestrate, and feed inference jobs. That is the entire bull case stated as a multiple. Freedom Broker stacked on top with a Buy and a $100 target, up from $25, citing Google and Terafab as proof points that Intel's industry relevance is rebuilding in real time. With INTC at $97.87, every live target except Evercore's $111 and KeyBanc's $110 now sits below spot.

What the Q1 Print Actually Showed

None of the analyst moves are happening in a vacuum. Last Thursday's Q1 was a complete reset: revenue of $13.58 billion against a $12.42 billion consensus, with non-GAAP EPS of $0.29 versus a $0.01 number, and the stock gapped 24% in a single session — Intel's best day since 1987. The line item driving the re-rate was the Data Center and AI segment, which printed $5.1 billion in revenue, up 22% year over year, with operating margin expanding from 13.9% to 30.5%. That is the kind of incremental margin that breaks every prior DCF on the name. Management then guided Q2 to $13.8 to $14.8 billion in revenue against a $12.8 billion street, confirming the demand is not a one-quarter pull-forward. Foundry is still bleeding a $2.4 billion quarterly operating loss, but the moment Intel can describe DCAI as a 30%-margin business with a real second derivative, foundry becomes a discrete bet rather than the whole story.

Tesla 14A and the Foundry Option

The other piece of the bid is the foundry side of the trade finally getting a real customer. Tesla confirmed on its earnings call last week that Musk's Terafab project in Austin will use Intel's 14A process node, making Tesla the first marquee external customer for the node. Lip-Bu Tan had openly told the market that Intel would walk away from contract manufacturing entirely if 14A could not land an external buyer, so the Terafab win is the difference between Intel having a foundry option and not having one. Pair that with the multiyear Google Cloud Xeon arrangement disclosed on the Q1 call and the analyst notes start writing themselves: the AI customer list is no longer hypothetical, and the foundry roadmap has at least one real anchor.

What the Tape Is Pricing

INTC is now up roughly 150% year to date, which makes it the loudest mega-cap turnaround tape on the screen. The risk that matters here is not the analyst pile-on — it is reflexivity. Spot through every published target except two means new buyers are paying for an upgrade cycle that has not yet arrived, and the foundry segment is still posting multi-billion-dollar quarterly losses while 14A volume production is targeted for 2027. The HIP-3 perp ran $70.5 million in 24-hour volume as the move extended, and funding will tell you whether desks are still adding into the print or just rotating size. The cleanest invalidation is a Q2 print that does not confirm DCAI's margin step-up; until then, the tape has a fundamental story to lean on for the first time in years.

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