Intel bumped its 2026 capex forecast by $2 billion and said it plans to tap capital markets for additional funds.

  • The South Korean market fell sharply on Friday, pressuring the U.S. chip trade.
  • Analysts said expectations of upbeat results were already baked into the INTC stock before the report.
  • Stocktwits sentiment for INTC shifted to ‘extremely bullish’ from ‘neutral.’

Intel Corp.’s stock rose nearly 4% in early premarket trading on Friday after the chipmaker’s upbeat quarterly results outweighed pressure from a broad selloff in South Korean chip stocks.

Intel’s shares had climbed as high as 12% in Thursday’s after-market session just after the report.

South Korea’s KOSPI declined 5.8% by Friday afternoon in Seoul, while Samsung and SK Hynix stocks slid 7.6% and 8.3%. The move in U.S. semiconductor stocks has become increasingly bundled with KOSPI, which is heavily weighted toward chipmakers Samsung and SK Hynix and has seen increased volatility lately.

The Direxion Daily South Korea Bull 3X Shares (KORU), a three-times leveraged ETF tracking South Korea’s largest stocks, dropped 8.5%. The sentiment for the fund has dipped steadily over the past week and was ‘bearish’ as of the last reading.

Intel Q2 Earnings: Retail Traders, Analysts React 

INTC was the top trending stock on Stocktwits early Friday, with retail sentiment moving to ‘extremely bullish’ from ‘neutral’ the previous day. Retail traders debated the company’s capital expenditure plans and foundry business update, while analysts noted that Wall Street had largely expected a strong quarter, with much of the optimism already priced into the stock ahead of the earnings release.

“INTC no way intel will stay at 100 and plus with that higher capex announcement wall street gonna dump on us,” a trader wrote, while another said, “$INTC can't hold a 9% gain for a few minutes, we're stuck here until 2027.”

Intel plans to spend $20 billion this year, up from its previous forecast of $18 billion, and could tap the capital markets for funds. Tech giants Alphabet and Amazon recently raised enormous amounts through debt and equity despite having significant cash already.

“INTC says they won't ramp Capex unless they were confident in customer commitments. Since they're raising Capex "significantly" next year, that means they're confident in those 10 long-term customers,” Deepwater Management founder Gene Munster said in an X post.

Based on Intel’s fine print, Munster broadly believes that the AI infrastructure buildout is still in its early stages, with demand for its CPUs benefiting from the broader hyperscaler investment cycle. 

While he sees Intel as a beneficiary of the AI boom, he believes Nvidia and AMD remain better ways to invest in the trend, noting that much of Intel’s recent optimism is already reflected in its valuation.

Intel’s turnaround is closely tied to its foundry business, which recently bagged new marquee customers such as Apple and Tesla. The unit narrowed its operating loss to $2.1 billion from a $3.2 billion loss a year earlier, but did not announce new customer wins in the report.

Intel’s Q2 Recap

The government-backed chipmaker’s second-quarter revenue increased 25% to $16.1 billion and adjusted earnings per share came in at $0.42 per share. Wall Street analysts had anticipated $14.5 billion in revenue and an adjusted profit of $0.22 per share, as per Fiscal.ai.

The revenue expansion was largely driven by Intel’s data center operations, where sales soared 59% last quarter to $6.3 billion. "In data centers, the CPU is taking off," CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in an interview with Bloomberg. "Demand is outpacing our increasing supply, and so those are good problems to have." 

Intel’s third-quarter sales and profit forecasts also came in above expectations. As of the last close, INTC shares had declined 29% from their peak on June 22 but remain 172% higher year to date.

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