MW Intel's stock is climbing. Here's why the company's new chip launch is so significant.

By Britney Nguyen

The company's launch of enterprise-focused processors shows that it's ready to ship high volumes of products made with its new chip technology, an analyst says

Intel announced its business-focused Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors on Wednesday.

Intel just announced new commercial personal-computer chips that will be built on the company's advanced process technology, signaling the semiconductor maker's faith in its manufacturing efforts.

The company $(INTC)$ has made an expensive bet on returning to glory as a foundry, or a business that makes chips for external clients. Some on Wall Street think the company should get out of the capital-intensive chip-manufacturing business altogether, given Intel's recent history of technological struggles and seemingly limited customer interest. And while management hasn't entirely ruled out that possibility, for now it's serious about winning foundry business.

That starts with proving that the company's advanced 18A process node is viable for Intel's own manufacturing efforts. Intel presumably could have outsourced the manufacturing to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TW:2330), like it does with some of its other chips, but instead the company chose to put 18A to work with the new PC processors.

"It's not trivial to have a chip ready for that so soon," Dave Altavilla, principal analyst at HotTech Vision and Analysis, told MarketWatch, referencing the business-focused chips.

In January, Intel introduced the consumer version of the PC chips, code-named Panther Lake, as the first to be designed on "the most advanced semiconductor process ever developed and manufactured in the United States."

The fact that Intel is following up just three months later with its enterprise version is a sign that Panther Lake, the chip architecture and the Core Ultra Series 3 chips are "very much ready for prime time at the highest volumes they can ship," Altavilla said.

He sees the development as a "ringing endorsement that Intel is confident" in its 18A process.

Intel's stock was up more than 5% after the market open on Wednesday.

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Even though millions of PCs are purchased directly by consumers, enterprise is a higher volume driver for Intel, because companies have to buy fleets of machines for employees around the world, Altavilla explained. That means there's a lot of demand for 18A-based chips.

The 18A process node, which refers to the generation of a semiconductor-manufacturing technology and its characteristics, was "a big bet" for Intel, Altavilla said, as the company looks to regain its leadership in chip manufacturing.

Panther Lake was the effort to do that, he said. The central-processing-unit "tile" - a separate silicon die in the chip - is the only part of the design that is built on 18A, he noted. That tile so far has proved to perform well and be power-efficient, Altavilla said, and therefore "really signals a coming of age of 18A for Intel." The Panther Lake series has also been well-received by Intel's partners, including HP $(HPQ)$, Dell Technologies $(DELL)$ and Lenovo Group (HK:992), he added.

Analysts have been focused on 18A as an indicator that Intel is capable of getting competitive on the manufacturing side once again. However, the next-generation 14A node that is expected late next year or in 2028 is "where Intel needs to execute next" if it wants to attract external customers to its foundry services, Altavilla said.

"This chip family is doing what Intel needed to do," Tom Mainelli, the head of the device and consumer research group at International Data Corp., told MarketWatch.

Intel's two-decade-old vPro business-computing platform included with its new commercial chips also helps differentiate the company against PC CPU rivals, namely Advanced Micro Devices $(AMD)$.

Demand for vPro has been inconsistent, Mainelli said, but now he sees more interest "because it's addressing a lot of the challenges that IT faces around manageability and security." One feature that Mainelli found impressive was Device IQ, an AI-enabled feature that can proactively find, diagnose and fix issues on a device.

The new Intel Threat Detection Technology, which uses AI to find advanced malware threats in real time, is another unique feature in the market, Altavilla said.

Still, the PC market has been negatively impacted by the shortage of memory chips and now a scarcity of CPUs, which have become critical components of AI data centers.

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The memory market is undergoing a "dynamic situation," David Feng, vice president of Intel's client computing group, told MarketWatch. Intel is working with both memory vendors and its downstream partners to address the supply issues, he added.

"We see very high demand for our compute products, we're working hard to meet demand and we're constantly calibrating and assessing what it will do to the total available market in the future," Feng said.

-Britney Nguyen

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March 25, 2026 09:56 ET (13:56 GMT)

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