Intel Corp's share jump to $27.55 in mid-February turned out to be short-lived and was replaced by a retest of the technical support area around $20 in early March. However, investors in Intel have new hope after a nearly 13% spike well above $23 per share during the pre-market trading activity on March 13. In order not to rush to further mid-term conclusions, now we just need to wait until at least the end of the current week, and better yet, the dynamics of the first two days following the weekend. However, the reason for higher excitement this time seems worth attention.

A joint venture to operate Intel’s business in the United States is ultimately formed, according to Reuters sources, with a deal struck by the wide pool of great chip makers, led by Taiwan Semiconductor, with all grands including NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom participating as Intel’s biggest potential manufacturing customers and Qualcomm "being approached". Joint venture drive for additional income and rising U.S. market share is clear but talks are still in an early stage. The only thing that looked known was that Trump's White House administration allegedly approached the Taiwan-rooted company to help rescue Intel. Such news looks more than plausible, considering Intel was suffering from technology gaps in the face of the AI chip domination. Intel missed the revolution in GPUs (graphic processing units). Republicans are ambitious for not to come to terms with Intel's loss-making factories which they consider as a national treasure. Therefore, making more efforts for a spin-off of Intel's foundry units is a reasonable step.

Another sign of a possible sanitation is Lip-Bu Tan's fresh appointment as Intel's head at this supposedly pivotal moment. To give you a small background, Lip-BuTan is a 65 yo Malaysian-born executive who grew up in Singapore, holding degrees in both physics and nuclear engineering. He initially joined Intel's board in 2022, and he led a chip design software company named Cadence before that. Cadence was among Intel's suppliers for more than a decade. Cadence stock actually climbed over 4,000% under his direct guidance. However, he had to quit Intel's board in summer 2024 due to reported disagreements with Intel's former CEO's Gelsinger's plans, as Tan got frustrated by Intel’s risk-averse and bureaucratic culture. When Gelsinger took the reins four years ago, Intel stock was trading above $60, but times are changing.

In early March, TSMC officially said at a press event with Trump that it plans to make a $100 billion investment to build five additional chip facilities in the U.S. Trump has yet to approve TSMC's proposal, but the same sources said the U.S. President is going to allow TSMC to operate former Intel’s factories under the condition that TSMC will not own more than 50% in the joint venture. Help is on the way. If so, Intel's comeback is somewhere around the corner, even though any real business transformation would take years, so that the crowd of investors should be patient anyway.