Why Intel Jumped 26% in January

Shares of processor giant Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) jumped another 25.9% in January, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The January surge was all the more impressive considering Intel had already rallied 84% in 2025. Yet, whereas the 2025 surge largely reflected a change in sentiment amid the appointment of new CEO Lip-Bu Tan and investments in the company from the U.S. government, Nvidia, and Softbank, January's surge was based on the release of an actual new product: Intel's Panther Lake CPU.

As Intel's first product-to-market built on its new 18A node, on which former CEO Pat Gelsinger said he "bet the company," Intel had to "stick the landing" with Panther Lake's release, so to speak. Fortunately, early reviews of Panther Lake-based laptops show Intel has done exactly that.

Intel takes CES for the first time in a while

Five years ago, former CEO Pat Gelsinger embarked on an ambitious "five nodes in four years" plan to bring Intel's manufacturing back to parity with, or even ahead of, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE: TSM).

That "fifth" and final node of the transition was 18A, which features not only a new gate-all-around transistor called RibbonFET, but also backside power delivery, in which the power supply network is moved to the underside of the silicon, leaving more room for transistors on the front of the chip. It's also possible that 18A utilizes new high-NA EUV lithography technology for some of its layers, although that hasn't been officially disclosed. Of note, TSMC's 2nm technology does not utilize backside power delivery, nor does it use high-NA EUV.

And while many were optimistic 18A would achieve its goal, skeptics certainly had their reasons, given Intel's track record over the past decade.

Yet when Intel formally introduced Panther Lake chips at the CES in early January, technology enthusiasts came away, well, enthusiastic. In particular, reviewers touted:

• Excellent integrated graphics: PCWorld tested Intel's Core Ultra x9 388H chip (one of the several Panther Lake SKUs) with Intel's integrated Arc B390 chiplet. According to the reviewer, the new Panther Lake/Arc combination easily beat competitors Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) and Qualcomm integrated laptop configurations for gaming by a wide margin.
• Excellent Battery life: In the same PCWorld review, the Panther Lake laptop's battery life was also the best the reviewers had ever seen, lasting 22 hours while playing 4K video and 14 hours while simulating office work.
• Impressive performance: While Panther has succeeded with battery life, it also sports roughly 50% higher multi-threaded performance than Intel's Lunar Lake chip, which is Intel's prior generation low-power laptop chip that's actually manufactured at TSMC.
• AI inference: For artificial intelligence tasks that can be done entirely on-device, Panther Lake's neural processing unit (NPU) sports 50 TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second), another 120 TOPS in the Xe GPU, and another 10 on the CPU for 180 total TOPS, 50% higher than Lunar Lake's 120 TOPS.

The generally very positive reviews confirming Panther Lake living up to its advertised specs seemed to prove Intel's 18A process had successfully delivered a leading-edge product for the first time in about a decade.

Image source: Getty Images.

But Intel sold off after earnings

Intel's stock was actually a bit higher in mid-January than where it ended the month, as it pulled back from its highs after the company reported earnings on Jan. 22. While Q4 revenue and adjusted earnings beat expectations, management guided for a sequential decline in revenue and profit for the current first quarter.

However, the low guidance wasn't due to a lack of demand. In fact, not only does Panther Lake appear to be a success, but Intel's server business is also seeing very high demand, as its Granite Rapids product appears to be a sought-after CPU for enterprise inference applications. In fact, the demand is so unexpectedly high that Intel essentially shut down some of its older PC chip manufacturing lines to convert them to making server chip tiles.

That process began in the third quarter of 2025, but since it takes many months to make a chip, the first output from that "switch" won't come out until the end of the first quarter. Meanwhile, Intel has already sold down much of its "buffer" inventory in the fourth quarter, before its converted manufacturing lines come online, which is why the first quarter will be down.

But having too much demand relative to supply is a good problem to have. With the apparent success of Panther Lake and its data center segment also showing high AI-related demand, Intel's January gains were well-deserved, and its financials should accelerate in the second half of the year as the company brings more supply online.

Billy Duberstein and/or hsi clients have positions in Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.