Intel stock rises as CEO Lip-Bu Tan touts 'exciting new products' with Nvidia

Intel (INTC) stock rose on Monday, a day after CEO Lip-Bu Tan posted on X that the company and Nvidia (NVDA) are working to “develop exciting new products.”

Tan initially wrote the post to congratulate Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on receiving an honorary doctoral degree in science and technology from Carnegie Mellon University on Sunday. Tan draped the doctoral hood over Huang.

Intel stock closed out the traiding day up more than 3%. The chipmaker’s stock price has rocketed more than 245% year to date and 494% over the last 12 months.

In September, the company and Nvidia announced they are collaborating on products for data centers, including the ability to connect Nvidia’s GPUs to Intel’s CPUs for AI workloads. The companies are also teaming up to produce Intel chips for consumer PCs that integrate Nvidia’s RTX GPU chiplets into Intel’s system-on-a-chip.

Nvidia also announced at the time that it was taking a $5 billion stake in Intel.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Intel and Apple have entered into a preliminary agreement that will see Intel produce chips for some Apple (AAPL) products, though it’s unclear which devices will get the processors.

Intel’s foundry business is one of the keys to its broader turnaround effort. The company is hoping to become a contract manufacturer for chip designers akin to rival TSMC (TSM), which produces processors for customers ranging from Apple and Nvidia to AMD (AMD) and Qualcomm (QCOM).

Intel’s foundry segment generated $5.4 billion in Q1, up 16% year over year. Intel is the business’s biggest customer.

The company, which was once seen as an afterthought in the chip space, has gotten a reprieve thanks to the explosion of interest in AI agents, or high-powered bots that can perform semi-autonomous and autonomous tasks on a user’s behalf.

While GPUs like Nvidia’s still train and run AI services, the actions that bots take, such as sorting files or producing slideshow presentations, require the use of CPUs like Intel’s.