Trace Intel's Comeback From the Brink to a Triple in a Year
The stock tripled, the dividend stayed gone, and a half-finished Ohio campus sits at the center of both. Here is what actually happened, in plain terms.
A thousand acres of flat land in New Albany, Ohio has been a construction site since 2022, and it has still not shipped a finished chip. That empty field is now the most interesting thing about Intel. I kept coming back to it while checking the numbers behind the stock's run.
The number everyone quotes is 389. Barchart and Yahoo Finance both carried it in early August 2026, as the share gain over the trailing fifty-two weeks. Year to date the stock was up about 170 percent. Yahoo's headline took the simpler route: Intel tripled in a year. Measured from its 2025 low, the climb was almost sixfold. Each number is true; each uses a different starting line.
Here is the surprise. This is the same company that cut its dividend in February 2023, suspended it altogether in August 2024, and got dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average late in 2024. Stocks do not usually behave this way after a stretch like that.
A government stake changed the mood
The turning point was not a product. It was a stake. In 2025 the US government converted federal support into equity: manufacturing grants from the 2022 CHIPS Act, plus about $3.2 billion in Defense Department contracts. The result was a roughly 10 percent position in Intel. Business Insider, relaying the Financial Times, called it the largest federal equity intervention in an American company since the 2009 GM bailout.
The detail I found most telling is how fast it happened. The request arrived as effectively non-negotiable, and Intel's board pushed back for about two days before agreeing. Whatever anyone thinks of a government owning part of a chipmaker, the market read it as a floor under the company. The mood changed almost overnight.
Then the customers showed up
With that floor in place, the business story began to improve on its own. Microsoft signed on to use Intel's 18A process for a chip design. Amazon Web Services agreed to a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar collaboration. Nvidia invested $5 billion and SoftBank put in $2 billion. Apple reached a preliminary agreement, and Google's parent Alphabet reportedly ordered millions of AI chips.
The earnings finally backed the story up. In the quarter Intel reported in mid-2026, revenue rose 25 percent year over year to $16.1 billion, which the company called its strongest growth in more than fifteen years. The data center and AI segment grew 59 percent, and the foundry business grew 31 percent. Earnings per share came in about 200 percent above expectations.
And the 18A process itself, the advanced node Intel bet the whole turnaround on, ramped to high-volume manufacturing. Its first product, a laptop chip called Panther Lake, launched in January 2026 and landed in more than 200 computer designs. For a while, 18A was the joke. Now real machines carry it.
The honest caveat
I do not want to oversell this. The Financial Times put it plainly in August: Intel's shares have quadrupled, but the company has yet to prove it is a serious manufacturing competitor to TSMC. The foundry still loses money, more than $9 billion in 2025 alone, and long-term debt sits above $43 billion. This is a comeback in progress, not a comeback completed.
That leads back to the Ohio field. On September 16, 2026, Reuters reported that SK Hynix, the South Korean memory-chip giant, is in exploratory talks with Intel about making memory chips in the United States for the first time. One idea on the table is for SK Hynix to lease part of Intel's delayed Ohio campus. Both companies stressed that nothing is finalized.
The comeback in numbers
- Trailing 52-week gain
- 389 percent, as of early August 2026
- Year-to-date gain
- About 170 percent
- From its 2025 low
- Almost sixfold
- Dividend
- Suspended since the fourth quarter of 2024
- Q2 fiscal 2026 revenue
- $16.1 billion, up 25 percent year over year
- Government stake
- About 10 percent, converted from federal support
Why it is worth a little optimism
None of this is abstract if you hold a broad index fund. Intel is big enough that a sliver of it shows up in millions of retirement accounts, usually without the owner ever noticing. The dividend that vanished in 2024 was, for decades, one of those quiet, reliable payouts that income-focused investors leaned on. That loss, and its possible return, is a story of its own, which I cover in a companion piece.
Here is my honest read, and it is where the joy lives. A company that looked finished, dividend gone, dropped from an index, factories half-built, became the center of the country's chip ambitions again. Whether it succeeds is genuinely uncertain. The empty Ohio field has sat there for four years, and now two rivals might share it. That is not a guarantee. It is a reason to keep watching, and I will.
The GM parallel is the part worth remembering. In 2009 the government stepped into a carmaker everyone had written off, and the taxpayer eventually got paid back. Intel is not GM, and the ending is not written. But a half-built factory in Ohio now has the attention of the world's second-largest memory-chip maker. Four years of silence, then a reason to look up.
Sources
Every factual claim above traces to one of these. Links open in a new tab.
- Intel Quashed Its Dividend in 2024. Now the Stock's Up 389% and Investors Want It Back.
- Intel Quashed Its Dividend in 2024. Now the Stock's Up 389% and Investors Want It Back.
- Intel Stock Has Risen Sixfold from Its 2025 Lows, but Don't Expect a Dividend Yet
- Inside Intel: how America's chip champion came back from the brink
- Intel brought from the brink by U.S.'s 10% stake in the company, FT says
- Intel is booming a year after the U.S. government bought a stake. Is that a win-win?
- SK Hynix Pushes Back On Intel U.S. Chip Deal Report, Says 'Nothing Has Been Finalized'
- EXCLUSIVE: SK Hynix in talks with Intel about deal to make memory chips in US for the first time, sources say
