Chip stock Intel (INTC) saw its share price surge in the last six months. But recently, some of the luster dropped off that rally, and reports emerged suggesting why. The cause seems to be attributable to three main points, but only one really hits home. Investors, meanwhile, soldiered on and gave Intel shares a 2.5% boost in Thursday afternoon’s trading.TipRanks Welcomes a New ETF – NYSE:RANK TipRanks has entered a new arena in the investing world, powering the index of an ETF based on its unique data now trading under the ticker RANK on the NYSE. RANK tracks the performance of the TipRanks US Momentum Analysts Index, a rules-based index of 50 large U.S. companies.
Two factors contributed to the decline. One of these was AMD (AMD), which recently passed Intel in data center sales. Data center sales had long been Intel’s main province, but in the first quarter of 2026, AMD out-earned Intel, bringing in $5.8 billion against Intel’s $5.1 billion. That’s a blow, but with $5.1 billion still in hand, Intel had hardly been dealt a serious loss. The second was an overall sell-off in the chip stock sector, which dragged down most stocks in the sector to one degree or another.
The biggest blow came from reports that 18A would not start producing results in quantity until later this year or possibly in 2027. Bulls figured that Intel’s 18A process would turn around profitable levels sooner than that, and the revelation that that was not to be turned a few of those bulls around. Intel’s gains had priced in success. Without that success to follow, some bulls got out, prompting the losses.
