INTC Holds $115 as Cramer Ranks Intel Above Nvidia

The Double Upgrade Doing the Work

The engine behind this tape is still BofA analyst Vivek Arya, who double-upgraded Intel from Underperform straight to Buy on June 11, skipping Neutral entirely and lifting his price target to $135 from $96. Double upgrades are rare for a reason — they're an analyst admitting the prior thesis was wrong, not just nudging a number. Arya's new model leans on the agentic-AI server CPU market, projecting Intel's data center CPU sales reach $40 billion by 2030 and earnings power above $6 a share, up from a prior $3-4. The firm's most bearish voice on the name capitulating in one move is what gave the upgrade its weight, and it's why the stock is still holding the gain rather than fading it.

Cramer Flips the Hierarchy

The amplifier was Jim Cramer, who used his June 11 Mad Dash segment to rank Intel ahead of every chip stock he covers: "I think that this is the number one name. I think it's a more important name than Nvidia right now." That inverts the entire AI-trade hierarchy that has put Nvidia at the top of the cycle for two years. The reaction wasn't isolated to Intel — the iShares Semiconductor ETF jumped more than 8% on the session, so part of what's holding INTC up is a sector-wide bid, not a single-name story. The HIP-3 perp logged roughly $131 million in 24-hour volume, a sign the move pulled in real positioning rather than passive drift.

The Foundry Leg Underneath

What makes $115 defensible is that the CPU thesis is layered on top of an earlier, separate trade. Around June 8, multiple reports said Google and Nvidia tapped Intel as a backup manufacturer as TSMC ran out of leading-edge capacity — Google reportedly ordering more than three million in-house TPUs for 2028, with Nvidia evaluating Intel's 18A and 14A nodes plus its EMIB packaging. That sits alongside a foundry unit already scaling, which booked roughly $5.4 billion in Q1 2026 revenue, up 16% year over year. So there are now two distinct engines — datacenter CPUs and external foundry volume — and the upgrade cycle has been pricing both. The honest read on the current window: shares tagged $118.83 on Thursday before easing to $115.30, which is consolidation of a sharp repricing, not a new leg. The question is whether the $40 billion CPU number and the foundry order convert into shipped silicon, because that's what the move is now underwriting.