Did you know that a large part of the chip industry depends on a single road in North Carolina? That road runs out of the town of Spruce Pine, where most of the world’s supply of ultra-pure quartz is found. And the loss of that road to Hurricane Helene may have crippled chipmaker Intel (INTC), whose shares are down 2.5% in Monday afternoon’s trading.
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Hurricane Helene proved a disaster for large portions of the U.S. Southeast. Several towns in Florida, for example, no longer exist as anything more than a concept. The Town of Spruce Pine, in particular, took it on the chin as the major road leading into the tiny mining town was struck by the hurricane. With over two feet of rain dropped, power is out throughout the region, and many roads are impassable.
Without the quartz that Spruce Pine mines, the entire chip industry could be left scrambling. There are other places to get quartz—which is used to melt polysilicon—but not of the quality that Spruce Pine produces. Without that quartz, the chip industry would have to basically make ultra-pure silicon another way, which means a lot more time, effort and resources going into the process.
New Specs and AI Tools
Intel will need all that quartz, too. New reports emerged around its Arrow Lake processor line, and it is showing some serious potential. TechRadar revealed that the new Arrow Lake line, specifically, the Core Ultra 9 285 is a 24-core processor with a base speed of 2.5 GHz and a maximum speed of 5.6. But reports saw something amiss in the testing, as the regular 285 proved significantly different than its unlocked counterpart.
Intel is also putting more into its AI operations, bringing out a new kind of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach to help improve the cost-effectiveness of AI. Since using RAG reduces cost and complexity—it removes the need to tune a large-language model, and that makes it that much more valuable to its end user.
Is Intel a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on INTC stock based on one Buy, 26 Hold and seven Sell ratings assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 33.54% loss in its share price over the past year, the average INTC price target of $25.47 per share implies 9.55% upside potential.
