Supply Shortages Send Intel Stock Sputtering

Intel’s “Made in America” mission remains a work in progress.

In the storied American chipmaker’s earnings call on Thursday, it delivered an unexpectedly dour outlook for the current quarter as supply shortages prevent it from meeting customer demand. Shares of the company cooled 4% Thursday ahead of the after-the-bell report, and as much as 6% in after-hours trading. Ouch.

Chips on the Table

President Trump, whose administration acquired a 10% stake in the company last year, wasn’t the only one to go from Intel skeptic to true-believer. In 2025, the company’s shares leapt more than 80% and another 37% in the New Year through Wednesday, reaching a four-year high. Wall Street had begun to buy into the company’s vision of an authentically American chip fabricator in the AI age — never mind the fact that Intel has often struggled to attract clients.

Now it has a new problem. Demand is “quite strong,” CEO Lip-Bu Tan told Bloomberg on Wednesday, but the company can’t make new chips fast, or rather effectively, enough:

• “Our yield and production manufacturing are not up to my standards. We need to improve that,” Tan told Bloomberg. In a note earlier this year, KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst John Vinh estimated the yield on Intel’s leading-edge chipmaking process was around 60%; that’s lower than master chipmaker TSMC’s 80% yield, but better than industry also-ran Samsung’s 40%.
• Still, Intel’s foundry unit generated $4.5 billion in revenue, up nearly 4% year over year and a decent chunk of its total $13.7 billion in revenue. For the current quarter, Intel predicted revenue of $11.7 billion to $12.7 billion, which disappointed Wall Street.

Looking Up: The good news is that CFO David Zinsner expects the company’s supply to reach its “lowest level” in the current quarter, before rebounding through the rest of the year. And Intel is hardly the only player in the game feeling a crunch: Micron, Broadcom and Nvidia are all chips off the old block with similar supply shortages. That’s good company to be in.