There are times when I do not know just what it is investors want out of chip stock Intel (INTC). Intel recently produced a pretty substantial win in the artificial intelligence (AI) space, a sector that Intel sorely needed a win in. But despite that, investors still took Intel shares behind the woodshed and took nearly 5.5% off its value in Tuesday afternoon’s trading.
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Intel’s win came not long after Cisco Systems (CSCO) announced its new release of Cisco Unified Edge, a tool that helps with AI inferencing and agentic AI operations, both increasingly valuable market sectors. The Unified Edge tool has plenty of uses, and firms from factories to healthcare operations to retail stores are eager to get it and put it to use.
The part that means something to Intel is that Cisco turned to Intel for its Xeon 6 server CPUs to handle the hardware side of the operation. Cristina Rodriguez, Intel’s vice president of the Network and Edge Group, noted, “By combining our silicon innovation with Cisco’s networking and compute expertise, we’re not just connecting edge locations — we’re extending the full power of the data center to wherever data needs to be processed.”
Pay Hikes in Israel
Then an interesting bit of news emerged for Intel, or rather, for Intel Israel. While Intel has been frantically cutting costs at every opportunity, including firing large swaths of employees, Intel Israel is actually hiking salaries by around 10% thanks to a major change in the overall pay structure.
Normally, Intel Israel’s pay package has four parts: the base salary, quarterly profit bonuses, an annual performance bonus, and what is known as an “Israeli component.” It is unclear just what that is, but it is also a moot point, as Intel is removing the Israeli component and building it directly into the base salary instead. This is actually similar to the pay structures that Intel is using worldwide anyway.
Is Intel a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on INTC stock based on three Buys, 24 Holds and six Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 69.38% rally in its share price over the past year, the average INTC price target of $35.44 per share implies 5.13% downside risk.
