While there can be no denying that chip stock Intel (INTC) is leaner these days, between the last round of layoffs and the one still said to be coming, Intel is also working on being greener, too. The latest reports suggest that Intel is ramping up its green aspirations along with its production, and investors were willing to take Intel at its word. That sent Intel shares up fractionally in Friday afternoon’s trading.
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The new reports say that Intel is out to have a “net zero greenhouse gas emissions” status by 2040, worldwide. To that end, it is putting some of its cash into renewable resources, as well as bolstering its supply chains and making the total system more energy-efficient. Intel has been working on this notion since 2022, reports note, when it first pledged to hit that net zero emissions status. And it has made substantial progress, too; emissions are down 43% against baseline measurements established in 2019.
And that is not all the progress, either; the reports noted that Intel is nearly completely running on renewable electricity—it is currently 1% shy of that figure—and Intel is actually water-positive right now in the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica and India, apparently managing to return 110% of freshwater used in its production processes.
A First For Intel
Moreover, the material that Intel is producing is also starting to land some wins in its own right. Reports noted that Intel has now achieved full neural processing unit (NPU) support in the MLPerf Client v0.6 benchmark. That is actually a substantial achievement, particularly since it is connected to artificial intelligence.
This is the first standardized evaluation, a report from Intel itself noted, for large language model (LLM) performance on NPUs. And with Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 processors, it can produce output not only on the graphics processing unit (GPU), but also on the NPU, and do so on both at a much higher rate than a human can actually read. That gives Intel a noteworthy edge in the AI market, and given that Intel has been lagging in this market for some time, may give it a chance to get some of that market share back.
Is Intel a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on INTC stock based on one Buy, 26 Holds and four Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 28.88% loss in its share price over the past year, the average INTC price target of $21.29 per share implies 0.73% upside potential.
