Intel Stock Hits All-Time High After Preliminary Chip Deal With Apple

In brief

• Apple and Intel reached a preliminary chip manufacturing agreement after more than a year of negotiations, per The Wall Street Journal.
• Intel stock hit an intraday high of $130.57 on May 8, 2026, surpassing the dot-com era peak of $74.88 from August 2000 by roughly 74%.
• President Trump personally lobbied Tim Cook for the deal, while the U.S. government holds a nearly 10% stake in Intel bought at $20.47 per share.

Intel and Apple have reached a preliminary agreement for Intel to manufacture some of the chips powering Apple devices, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Talks between the two companies have been ongoing for more than a year.

Markets did not wait for the fine print. Intel stock jumped over 13% on Friday, hitting an intraday high of $130.57—clearing the company's dot-com era closing high of $75.81, set back on the year 2000, by roughly 72%. For context: 365 days ago, Intel was trading near its 52-week low of $18.96.

Which products Intel would manufacture for Apple is still unclear, but Apple ships over 200 million iPhones per year on top of millions of iPads and Macs. It comes at an opportune time for Intel, as Nvidia and AMD have been steadily eating into its market share.

Right now Apple relies almost entirely on TSMC for its chips. Intel might focus on lower-volume products first and provide some diversification for Apple.

The White House played a direct role in getting the deal done. President Trump personally advocated for Intel to Tim Cook at a meeting at the White House. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was also involved in the outreach. With this deal, Intel may be getting a major business boost (as the charts show), and the Trump administration may score a political victory after pushing very vocally about the importance of local U.S. chip manufacturing. Apple's participation, in turn, could help polish its relationship with the Trump administration.

The government has a very personal reason to care. Last August, the U.S. acquired a 9.9% stake in Intel by purchasing 433.3 million shares at $20.47 each—a total of $8.9 billion funded through the CHIPS and Science Act and secure semiconductor programs, per Intel's SEC filing. With Intel now trading above $120, that position has ballooned to well over $50 billion in value. Trump took to Truth Social last week to claim credit for “making the United States of America over 30 Billion Dollars.”

Intel's turnaround story has had a lot of moving parts. The government stake was followed by a Panther Lake chip launch—Intel's first product on its advanced 18A manufacturing process—then a $5 billion investment from Nvidia and a $2 billion injection from SoftBank. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who took over in March 2025 after years of Intel losing market share to AMD, Nvidia and Apple Silicon, has been hunting for partners and customers ever since.

AMD has been a relentless pressure point. As Decrypt reported last October, AMD secured a massive 6 gigawatt GPU deal with OpenAI—a deal that included OpenAI acquiring up to 10% of AMD's equity. That was AMD staking its claim in AI infrastructure. Intel, by contrast, was betting on foundry customers. Now it may have landed the biggest one imaginable.

Apple's first Intel-manufactured chips, if the timeline holds, would be roughly 18 months away.