Gustavo Neffa
Partner & Director at Research for Traders, Economist & Professor
Intel is headed for a $1 trillion market cap as Apple explores it as a manufacturing partner for its main device processors. Per @StockSavvyShay, the move would give Apple foundry options beyond TSMC and reduce its reliance on a single supplier. x.comÂ
US sovereign AI and defense demand for domestically made compute will bring Intel most, if not all, US semiconductor designers as customers. PC weakness also lets Intel shift wafers to higher-margin server CPUs, but that takes a few quarters; capacity to ship more server CPUs is the limiter. The $240 billion 2030 server CPU market forecast is a stretch case, not the base case, versus roughly $200 billion consensus. x.com x.com x.com x.com x.comÂ
Shorting Apple should be the play tomorrow on a new Bloomberg report, via @StockMKTNewz, that Apple is negotiating to buy memory chips from two Chinese semiconductor makers on a Pentagon blacklist to ease the impact of the global memory shortage. x.comÂ
Intel is becoming a national AI infrastructure crown jewel, and $1T is only a start if it executes. Apple's preliminary deal to build chips on 18A-P, Google's reported 3M+ TPU orders through 2028 and its role as primary foundry for Elon Musk's TerraFab support that, alongside government and Nvidia stakes. EMIB-T packaging is its trump card: it can package chiplets built on anyone's silicon, including TSMC's, easing CoWoS constraints. If 18A misses, the foundry re-rating would take longer. x.com … Show more
Apple and Nvidia look protected by policy after President Trump bought them and other tech giants and then reversed tariffs that sent them surging, per a newly released disclosure. The administration has signaled through actions which companies it considers too important to fail, making these AI-backbone names unlikely targets of surprise regulation or punitive tariffs. Watch what gets bought in the next selloff. x.com x.comÂ
Apple looks unattractive at 31x next-12-month EPS as memory prices are set to hurt both its revenue and gross margins. Not investing heavily in AI capex or LLM training helps in the near term but carries longer-term risks. x.comÂ
Intel is the poster child of hype-driven bottleneck trades with very little substance, so the risk is being the last one at the party. @munster_gene expects Apple to add at best a couple of billion dollars of revenue to Intel starting in 2028, likely about 2% of the business then. x.comÂ
Intel's government backing signals that it will sit at the center of where the semiconductor supply chain is heading. The US government's $8.9B stake, bought at $20.47 a share in August, is up 315%, a $28B gain, and Nvidia followed with $5B just 27 days later, which is a signal, not a coincidence. The government does not buy $8.9B of anything it plans to let die, so never fight it when it puts capital behind something. x.comÂ
Apple lags on AI and suffers from AI-driven cost shocks to components such as memory and storage. x.comÂ
Apple is the obvious flight to safety in US markets because it wins on access to cheap memory and on open-source AI. x.comÂ