Huh, I'm used to "stock collapses" headlines being a 2% daily fluctuation. Actually down 50% over the past month. But then again, up 50% over the past year. Sure is great when stocks of companies that are foundationally important to the world economy are being traded like meme stocks.
Stocks are valued as the sum total of all the money they ever make.
So $1/year - the are worth infinity.
But due to 'time value of money' (aka some risk free discount rate you can put your money elsewhere at get the same return for no risk, like your bank account), then the infinite sum of those $1 / year is some value.
The problem is when profits grow is perpetually higher than the cost of borrowing - the net present value goes to infinity.
So the P/E ratio is 1/(cost of capital - growth).
So an investor with 8% cost of capital, a company growing at 3% per year woudl have a P/E of 20.
At 7% growth the value is p/e 100x ...
Any growth over the 'cost of capital' and the P/E goes to infinity because the infinite sum of all future cash flows does not converge.
Basically - when there are gigantic swings of things like more than 30% growth for any extended period, it's extremely hard to value.
Verizon is valued as it is because they have an operational lock on a system, they will never grow that much but their returns are predictable.
All this AI stuff is 'inherently wild' - and yes, there is a lot of hyperbole and speculation.
This this is different than Space X which is 'Musk Meme' stuff.
My interpretation is that the stock market is just reflecting the rising value of power/influence assets relative to currency, which is to say, the falling value of currency relative to power/influence (which stocks are). Stocks aren't going up because the companies are that much better, they're going up because the macroeconomy is that much more fucked.
Yup we live inside an ever growing noise factory thanks to modern news/social media attention harvesting dynamics. All sides are using it on autopilot.
The systems are optimized for pumping more and more bits out. Not to measure/reduce noise and increase signal.
Individually its easier to tune it out.
Intel was at 15 bucks for multiple years post its peaks.
Anyone remember when a college student invested $700,000 of his grandmother's inheritance into Intel back in August 2024? He was a huge meme at the time; I bet he was singing a different tune a few weeks back!
Im still bullish on them at this price though. The terafab (already under construction) collab with Elon and 14A being the most powerful chip when they get it right has a lot of potential.
I'm still salty at them for fumbling Optane, Gaudi, Altera and the Xeon Phi. the company seems like it's full of talented engineers working under terrible leadership.
The list of shit that Intel was within the ballpark of the right tech or 5 years mistimed from having a huge hit is ridiculous. Fuckers don't have good management, but also must have terrible luck to keep _just_ missing the mark?
Intel bring the knowledge but doesn't operate and it's not the only partners in talk. They are not tied into the production at any step beyond the blueprints.
Knowing them they'll have all this stuff online just as the AI bubble pops. Basically the same thing they did when they belatedly tried to get into mobile chips
It's always crazy running into people that are somehow unaware that Wintel has achieved worldwide domination of IT infrastructure (by number of users). This site is like a sealed terrarium of people using macOS on Apple ARM hardware blissfully unaware of the infinite black pit outside the glass.
And yet Intel is the one taking a dump here, because it has no moat. People use Wintel because people use Wintel, the same way people bought Gros Michel bananas because people bought Gros Michel bananas. When they went away, people bought something else.
There isn't a single country in the world that can make advanced chips on its own. It takes machines, raw materials an chemicals from over a dozen different countries.
You're absolutely right! And that is why the last couple of years has been fascinating to watch from a geopolitical and trade standpoint.
Watching China push its weight around earlier in the year with REM and REE was crazy. The US, and the rest of the world for that matter, were brought to our knees. Germany's auto industry and weeks of chips left, the US started shipping F35's to allies _without_ radar. Truly astounding trade power to see.
Made it very clear to every nation that you must have a sovereign story to tell about chip manufacturing.
You'd open your phone and nothing would work, not even the connection to the cellular network since your phone company has management components running on AWS.
PCs are like 5% of computing devices. Very important for business offices but not outside of that niche. And mass amounts of servers can be adapted to whatever is cheapest. Google wouldn't insist on AMD64 - they'd port to ARM if ARM was cheaper. And if you do want AMD64, AMD currently makes better AMD64 chips.
Nah they've been "out of fashion" for 5+ years, and in that time AMD took their datacenter crown, which was also encroached on by various ARM hyperscaler systems.
There will be a company using Intel's fabs to make chips 5, 10 or 20 years from now. Because it is in the national interest of US to make sure that happens.
It is not in the national interest to make sure that the Intel common stock remains valued above 0. Plenty of companies that are of national interest were saved directly from bankruptcy, by nationalizing them in a way that wipes out the common stock.
Failure here is getting restructured and people losing money in the stock market, which I guess is so detached from the actual companies and reality that it might as well be a polymarket bet (I mean overall stock market and not intel specifically).
"Failure" here can be something like the stock going to near 0 and then the govt hands Intel fabs to some other rich company that it likes, for example SpaceX at a criminally low rate
A lot of retail investors lose the shirts off their backs holding Intel stock well before Intel every approaches anything close to "failure". Intel stock could drop 90% and the machines will still be running, because stock valuations which aren't tied to fundamentals on the way up are also not tied to fundamentals on the way down.
In the worst case when the free market deems Intel worthless, the government will nationalize Intel at a cheap nominal price. Shareholders are wiped out anyways.
That's just one small event along the way, one that occurred many years after Intel started slipping enough for long enough that an iPhone was more powerful than an Intel laptop and after Intel's fabs failed to produce a useful new generation many generations in a row and after Intel acquired many companies just to spin down their products and after...
Sure, the Core 2 series ultimately, after a long gap, put them back on the rails at least, but Intel missed big iron and panicked.
Everything else since has been about desperately squeezing x86 into every niche, even when it probably shouldn’t be. That the Core 2 series gained an Apple-shaped halo is lucky for them, but the reality is that they have been on the back foot at some level since the failure of IA-64.
They needed to get themselves out of the hole by using AMD’s architecture, and they have been a polar bear on an iceberg ever since.
I notice modern intel chips are still named after Skylake. It's as if that's when they decided to stop innovating.
They used to use completely new names for new designs and then variants of that name for variants of that design. As in Sandy Bridge and then Ivy Bridge. Haswell, then Broadwell. Skylake, then Kaby Lake. Then Coffee Lake. Then Cannon Lake. 10 years later now they're still doing Lakes. It might not have much relation to the technical design but it gives the impression they gave up on new things.
Sometimes naming is just naming. No further depth or symbolism.
Skylake is when things started to go south, outwardly facing. But it was even long before that. The rot happened in the foundry side and it grew for a very long time, silently, because of how little competition existed.
The big question I have, why isn't Nvidia's stock falling quickly ? Nvidia's GPUs are the most in demand chip for AI. Seems Nvidia stock is also falling, but not as much. I would think it would fall almost as quickly as Intel.
Apple Silicon launched in Mac, the first couple iterations worked/sold great. By the launch of M3 market realized it wasn't a fluke and that x86 was dead but still fundamental due to deployment at the time
Flash forward a couple more years to now it's all about efficient model training which sucks on generic CPUs so everyone is buying and designing other chips
Two big consumer pivots over 4-5 years and boom ...they're IBM and handed lifelines to shore up chip manufacturing in the US for strategic reasons but Intel essentially manufactures rotary phones right now. Maybe the fab biz will get modern designs right. We'll see
Modern Intel chips have no issues trading blows with Apple Silicon.
Their fabs are the weakest part of their business (I wonder why once AMD spun off GlobalFoundries so they could focus on the core product, they suddenly started doing well) Once they started making chips on TSMC's processes, wow, all of a sudden, theyre in the same league as Apple Silicon.
Intel GPUs are pretty worthless right now for inference, let alone training. Which isn't to say that there aren't people getting value out of them, but from a dollars/wattage/sanity to performance, there's no point to buying anything but Nvidia for most people and businesses. I don't want this to be the case, but that's just how it is currently.
I understand nothing but I want to join the conversation.
It seems to me that nvidia bubble is still to burst.
There is a trust me bro circle where Nvidia somehow sold GPU to itself so it can host someone else's models.
Maybe three years ago or a little more they announced they plan to move away from consumer end and focus on cloud. Back then it did not make much sense because everybody though "how the f Nvidia will manage clouds like AWS?" And their business model seems to me that it is a shared risk model where Nvidia don't "own" the cloud but pay for its GPU to have that market share.
I think it would make much sense if the thin layer those, how did the greedy musk said, neocloud/cloudfronts or whatever, were not so brittle due to the lack of market demand.
I have the impression they had a gold strategy for them but for some reason they rushed it too much and now they broke the market before they could profit from it.
I can imagine that if they didn't hoard their own resources to create scarcity artificiality, they would possibly have a stronger position in the market.
I can only think they did this because (A) they know the current government will bail them out and (B) someone was worried that China could hoard those GPUs first.
But as I said, I don't understand much of the topic, but it seems to me they are try to get as much money as soon as possible and that looks scam-ish to me. They all put investment rounds too close to each other, started creating concerning stories and "rogue" AIs at the same time. Maybe I'm being too paranoid, but so far those guys have been pulling some hat tricks and I think I know who will pay the bill
Edit:
Also I think the big ones artificially produced better numbers by doing massive layoff rounds. Depending on how those happen, it produces almost an immediate loss that can be smoothed, and then a peak on profit, and then we will see if their numbers keep up 2 or 3 quarter after that.
Maybe I have trust issues, but man, this does smell weird.
Nvidia is still the only game in town for training at scale, and the fastest for inference (plus, at scale, the cheapest for inference, as hard as that sounds to believe)
NVidia had $96B in revenue and $60B of profit in Q2 2026, both of which doubled or more from Q2 2025.
Intel in Q3 2026 had $16.5B in revenue and $3.3B of profit, and $13.7B and $4.4B in Q3 2025.
NVidia is doing much better than Intel, people are selling bonds and junk bonds to buy billions of dollars of NVidia cards that NVidia is making 75% gross margins on. They’re making the kind of profits that would make a drug dealer blush.
I used Q3 earnings for Intel because Nvidia hasn’t reported their Q3 earnings yet and Intel’s Q2 earnings showed losses in both 2026 and 2025.
Stocks are valued as the sum total of all the money they ever make.
So $1/year - the are worth infinity.
But due to 'time value of money' (aka some risk free discount rate you can put your money elsewhere at get the same return for no risk, like your bank account), then the infinite sum of those $1 / year is some value.
The problem is when profits grow is perpetually higher than the cost of borrowing - the net present value goes to infinity.
So the P/E ratio is 1/(cost of capital - growth).
So an investor with 8% cost of capital, a company growing at 3% per year woudl have a P/E of 20.
At 7% growth the value is p/e 100x ...
Any growth over the 'cost of capital' and the P/E goes to infinity because the infinite sum of all future cash flows does not converge.
Basically - when there are gigantic swings of things like more than 30% growth for any extended period, it's extremely hard to value.
Verizon is valued as it is because they have an operational lock on a system, they will never grow that much but their returns are predictable.
All this AI stuff is 'inherently wild' - and yes, there is a lot of hyperbole and speculation.
This this is different than Space X which is 'Musk Meme' stuff.
That's kinda the point; something as important as this shouldn't be a casino.
The systems are optimized for pumping more and more bits out. Not to measure/reduce noise and increase signal.
Individually its easier to tune it out.
Intel was at 15 bucks for multiple years post its peaks.
A country must feed itself, power itself, and in 2026 it must be able to manufacture its own chips (from ore, to refining, to the foundry).
Watching China push its weight around earlier in the year with REM and REE was crazy. The US, and the rest of the world for that matter, were brought to our knees. Germany's auto industry and weeks of chips left, the US started shipping F35's to allies _without_ radar. Truly astounding trade power to see.
Made it very clear to every nation that you must have a sovereign story to tell about chip manufacturing.
I would expect that "all laptops dematerialize" would be worse.
you miss at least several other niches
Advanced chip manufacturing is so incredibly hard. The finance bozos are clueless, again.
It is not in the national interest to make sure that the Intel common stock remains valued above 0. Plenty of companies that are of national interest were saved directly from bankruptcy, by nationalizing them in a way that wipes out the common stock.
Failure here is getting restructured and people losing money in the stock market, which I guess is so detached from the actual companies and reality that it might as well be a polymarket bet (I mean overall stock market and not intel specifically).
Sure, the Core 2 series ultimately, after a long gap, put them back on the rails at least, but Intel missed big iron and panicked.
Everything else since has been about desperately squeezing x86 into every niche, even when it probably shouldn’t be. That the Core 2 series gained an Apple-shaped halo is lucky for them, but the reality is that they have been on the back foot at some level since the failure of IA-64.
They needed to get themselves out of the hole by using AMD’s architecture, and they have been a polar bear on an iceberg ever since.
They used to use completely new names for new designs and then variants of that name for variants of that design. As in Sandy Bridge and then Ivy Bridge. Haswell, then Broadwell. Skylake, then Kaby Lake. Then Coffee Lake. Then Cannon Lake. 10 years later now they're still doing Lakes. It might not have much relation to the technical design but it gives the impression they gave up on new things.
Sometimes naming is just naming. No further depth or symbolism.
Skylake is when things started to go south, outwardly facing. But it was even long before that. The rot happened in the foundry side and it grew for a very long time, silently, because of how little competition existed.
Everything thereafter was pain.
I wonder if something else is happening to Intel
Nvidia Stock:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVDA/
Intel Stock:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INTC/
Flash forward a couple more years to now it's all about efficient model training which sucks on generic CPUs so everyone is buying and designing other chips
Two big consumer pivots over 4-5 years and boom ...they're IBM and handed lifelines to shore up chip manufacturing in the US for strategic reasons but Intel essentially manufactures rotary phones right now. Maybe the fab biz will get modern designs right. We'll see
Their fabs are the weakest part of their business (I wonder why once AMD spun off GlobalFoundries so they could focus on the core product, they suddenly started doing well) Once they started making chips on TSMC's processes, wow, all of a sudden, theyre in the same league as Apple Silicon.
It seems to me that nvidia bubble is still to burst. There is a trust me bro circle where Nvidia somehow sold GPU to itself so it can host someone else's models. Maybe three years ago or a little more they announced they plan to move away from consumer end and focus on cloud. Back then it did not make much sense because everybody though "how the f Nvidia will manage clouds like AWS?" And their business model seems to me that it is a shared risk model where Nvidia don't "own" the cloud but pay for its GPU to have that market share. I think it would make much sense if the thin layer those, how did the greedy musk said, neocloud/cloudfronts or whatever, were not so brittle due to the lack of market demand.
I have the impression they had a gold strategy for them but for some reason they rushed it too much and now they broke the market before they could profit from it.
I can imagine that if they didn't hoard their own resources to create scarcity artificiality, they would possibly have a stronger position in the market. I can only think they did this because (A) they know the current government will bail them out and (B) someone was worried that China could hoard those GPUs first.
But as I said, I don't understand much of the topic, but it seems to me they are try to get as much money as soon as possible and that looks scam-ish to me. They all put investment rounds too close to each other, started creating concerning stories and "rogue" AIs at the same time. Maybe I'm being too paranoid, but so far those guys have been pulling some hat tricks and I think I know who will pay the bill
Edit: Also I think the big ones artificially produced better numbers by doing massive layoff rounds. Depending on how those happen, it produces almost an immediate loss that can be smoothed, and then a peak on profit, and then we will see if their numbers keep up 2 or 3 quarter after that. Maybe I have trust issues, but man, this does smell weird.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMD/
I figured the current owners of INTC stock are betting on the success of their fab business.. I think that's still to play out.
things are changing but there is a sort of "no one ever got fired for using nvidia for inference." thing going on.
https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/ai-world-oracle-bri...
Intel in Q3 2026 had $16.5B in revenue and $3.3B of profit, and $13.7B and $4.4B in Q3 2025.
NVidia is doing much better than Intel, people are selling bonds and junk bonds to buy billions of dollars of NVidia cards that NVidia is making 75% gross margins on. They’re making the kind of profits that would make a drug dealer blush.
I used Q3 earnings for Intel because Nvidia hasn’t reported their Q3 earnings yet and Intel’s Q2 earnings showed losses in both 2026 and 2025.