Wall Street analysts had, by and large, welcomed Intel's new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, with cautious optimism when he first took charge of the struggling behemoth back in March 2025. Since then, however, the commentary around Intel has been somewhat ambivalent, and microdosed with enough qualifiers to suggest a general lack of conviction around Intel's turnaround.
Now, Loop Capital's Gary Mobley has added to this growing chorus, pegging a 'Hold' rating and a price target of $25 on Intel's shares.
Mobley - not to be confused with Intel's AV-focused Mobileye - declares that it is "difficult" to be more constructive around Intel's still-fledgling turnaround strategy, especially as the chipmaker faces an obvious "catch-22" situation:
"TSMC's advanced-node manufacturing is better, and for Intel Products to become more competitive with AMD, NVIDIA and the Arm community, TSMC is the obvious manufacturing partner for Intel Products' future compute tiles."
However, Mobley then goes on to point out the pitfalls embedded in this optimal route, which center on Intel's fixed costs that can't be covered without volume orders from the chipmaker's products division.
Consequently, with Intel Foundry and its products division joined at the proverbial hip for now, Mobley believes that the former may become a "headwind" for the latter. The analyst then posits:
"Should the Intel Corp story shift away from "Foundry 2.0", or detaches Foundry from Intel Corp, we may become more constructive with our rating."
Meanwhile, as we noted in another post last week, Wells Fargo has declared that "it’s still too early to underwrite a full turnaround" at Intel.
While Wells Fargo expects Intel to give a "net-positive" update at its Q2 earnings call on the yield progression of its 18A process, which is critical for its foundry division to attain breakeven status by 2027, ensuring a sustainable revitalization of the company's overall business momentum in the process, the bank expressed alarm over the still-unclear launch timing of the 18A-based Diamond Rapids Xeon CPUs.
Also, even though Wells Fargo continues to believe that the 18A-based Panther Lake CPUs will launch by the end of 2025, their volume ramp will likely remain a "1H26 story," as per the bank's latest assessment.
Wells Fargo also saw AMD continuing to gain market share at the expense of Intel "through 2H25 and into CY26," as the ascendant chipmaker taps into its 2nm-based Zen 6 EPYC platform.
As such, Intel is facing a dual squeeze on the client computing side from AMD- and ARM-based products, as per Wells Fargo's assessment.
Meanwhile, on the positive news front, KeyBanc noted last week that the yields on Intel's 18A process have reached 55 percent, representing a 5 percent quarter-on-quarter improvement.
Critically, Intel's 18A yields have already surpassed Samsung's SF2 yields, and are now close to achieving parity with TSMC's yields on its bespoke 2nm process.
Intel shares are up 0.5 percent in today's pre-market trading session. The chipmaker is set to announce its earnings for the second quarter of the year later this week.
About the author: Writing is my one incontrovertible passion. Over the past six years, he has authored over 2,200 distinct articles on financial and tech-related topics, spanning nearly 1 million words. And he has been a member of Wcctech mobile team since 2025. As an alumnus of the University of Toronto, Rotman Commerce Program, I bring nuance, in-depth knowledge, and a unique perspective to every topic that I cover. When I'm not writing, I'm traveling the world, exploring hidden confectionaries and restaurants as an aspiring food connoisseur.
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