Intel Expands AI Inference Capabilities: Will it Drive Growth?

Intel Corporation INTC recently announced a multiyear strategic collaboration with SambaNova, a leading AI inference platform and hardware provider. The partnership is set to focus on delivering high-performance, cost-efficient AI inference solutions built around Intel Xeon-based infrastructure.

The AI ecosystem is evolving rapidly. The focus is shifting from training big AI models with a large amount of data to AI inference workloads, that is, actually using the AI models in real time for various tasks.

AI workloads have become more complex. They are powered by heterogeneous infrastructure, which includes multiple computes working together, such as CPUs, GPUs, AI accelerators, networking architecture and software. A major revenue-generating opportunity lies at the inference level, that is, every AI query, such as search queries, recommendations in various AI tools.

Per a report from Grand View Research, the global AI inference market, which is estimated at $97.24 billion in 2024, is projected to witness a compound annual growth rate of 17.5% from 2025 to 2030. Intel is expanding its portfolio offering to capitalize on this emerging market trend.

Earlier, Intel successfully achieved MLPerf v5.1 benchmark requirements. MLPerf Inference v5.1 is the newest release of an industry-standard AI benchmarking suite. Intel has introduced its Crescent Island GPU optimized for AI inference workloads. Along with these factors, the recent collaboration with SambaNova aims to combine Intel Xeon processors, Intel GPUs, Intel networking and storage, and SambaNova systems. This will likely boost Intel’s commercial prospects in the AI inference domain.

How are Competitors Faring?

Intel faces competition from NVIDIA Corporation NVDA and Advanced Micro Devices AMD in the AI inference domain. NVIDIA offers a comprehensive portfolio for AI inference infrastructure. The NVIDIA Blackwell, H200, L40S and NVIDIA RTX offer remarkable speed and efficiency in AI inference across cloud, workstations and data centers.

AMD Instinct MI350 Series GPU, featuring powerful and power-efficient cores, has set a new benchmark in generative AI and high-performance computing in data centers. With NVIDIA’s dominance and AMD’s strong momentum, Intel faces a steep uphill battle in the AI inference domain.

INTC’s Price Performance, Valuation & Estimates

Shares of Intel have surged 103% over the past year compared with the industry’s growth of 56.4%.

Going by the price/book ratio, the company's shares currently trade at 1.85 book value, lower than 28.71 of the industry average.

Earnings estimates for INTC for 2025 and 2026 have declined over the past 60 days.

Intel stock currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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