Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) received its most aggressive analyst endorsement in years on Tuesday when HSBC upgraded the chipmaker from Hold to Buy and nearly doubled its price target from $50 to $95 — a call that now stands as the highest price target on the Street and implies significant upside from Intel’s current trading price of approximately $65 to $67.
HSBC analyst Frank Lee argued in a research note that while Intel’s stock has already surged approximately 60 to 80 percent since April 1 — driven largely by two major foundry-related announcements — the market has so far missed or undervalued what he described as a separate and equally significant catalyst sitting inside the core business.
“Though we agree these announcements paint a much more positive picture of Intel’s overall financial position as well as its foundry outlook, we believe the market is still overlooking a key element — the server CPU-led growth opportunity,” Lee wrote, framing the upgrade as a pivot to a thesis the broader analyst community had not yet fully priced in.
The foundry announcements that drove the initial rally were Intel’s repurchase of a 49 percent equity interest in its Ireland fabrication joint venture and its decision to join the Terafab project alongside SpaceX, Tesla and xAI as a manufacturing partner — both of which were interpreted as meaningful improvements in Intel’s long-term foundry competitive position and financial health.
HSBC’s separate server CPU argument is built on a projection that Intel will see approximately 20 percent year-on-year growth in server CPU shipments in 2026 alongside a similar 20 percent increase in average selling prices, driven by hyperscaler demand for data centre compute as agentic AI workloads continue scaling and supply constraints keep pricing elevated, potentially extending into 2027.
The firm’s 2026 and 2027 revenue estimates for Intel’s Data Center and AI segment — $22.8 billion and $29.1 billion respectively — sit 16 percent and 33 percent above the broader Street consensus, a gap that Lee argues represents the scale of the market’s current underestimation of what the server CPU cycle can deliver to Intel’s financial results over the next eighteen months.
The valuation methodology HSBC used is notable for what it deliberately excludes: the price target is based on a sum-of-the-parts approach applying a 26x target price-to-earnings multiple to Intel’s 2027 core business earnings estimate, with the Intel Foundry Services segment stripped out entirely because of continued uncertainty around external customer commitments and the pace of advanced process ramp.
That means the $95 target is achieved through the core CPU and data centre business alone — and Lee argues that even in a bear case scenario assuming only 10 percent server CPU shipment growth in 2027, his sensitivity analysis implies approximately 38 percent upside to Intel’s share price from current levels, making the call defensible even under pessimistic assumptions.
The broader analyst community remains far more cautious. The average price target across 33 analysts covering Intel sits at just $52.26, the majority carrying Hold ratings, and Intel Foundry posted an operating loss of $2.51 billion in Q4 2025 with Q1 2026 non-GAAP EPS guidance at $0.00 — numbers that remind investors the turnaround remains incomplete and the risks are real.
HSBC’s upgrade arrives one day after Stifel raised its Intel target from $42 to $65 while maintaining a Hold rating and on the same day BNP Paribas upgraded the stock to Neutral from Underperform with a $60 target, citing hyperscaler demand scrambling for server CPU supply as a near-term catalyst — a convergence of analyst upgrades that gives institutional cover to the bull case even among analysts short of HSBC’s conviction, with Intel’s Q1 2026 earnings scheduled for the following day, April 23.
