Long, long ago, Christmas time used to be a big time for telling ghost stories. Dark and cold times are pretty solid times for spooky stories, certainly, and chip stock Intel (INTC) was facing one such story as Broadcom (AVGO) might have been considering buying Intel. But that story was dispelled recently, and Intel shares shot up over 3% in Monday afternoon’s trading in response.
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Broadcom, via CEO Hock Tan, according to a report in Business Insider, revealed that Broadcom already has enough on its plate with developments in artificial intelligence (AI), and thus has no real bandwidth left to handle running Intel. Further, Hock Tan himself is still a bit gunshy after President Trump halted Broadcom’s attempt to buy Qualcomm (QCOM) back in 2018. With Trump coming back in a matter of weeks, launching a similar play would likely end, well, similarly.
Thus, Broadcom is operating under a “no hostile takeovers” policy, and with no one even mentioning the notion of buying Intel to Tan, the plan to go through with the buy is pretty much done for. With Broadcom already doubling its market cap to clear the $1 trillion mark earlier this year, and Intel losing over half its market cap at one point to hit $82 billion, the reports noted, it is pretty clear that Broadcom has little need for Intel, right now.
New Processor Use Cases
But Intel has not been idle, besides ducking potential takeover operations. The first CoPilot plus mini PC has emerged, noted a report from The Verge, and it packs Intel’s Core Ultra 9 processors. This PC got its first introduction back in September when Asus (ASUUY) rolled it out, and some new specs have emerged for it.
The device, known as the NUC 14 Pro AI, will offer five different configurations, including a Core Ultra 5 226V processor with 16 gigabytes of integrated RAM. Ultimately, one version will offer as much as 67 tera operations per second, though some will use the number “trillion” instead of “tera.” Another version will support up to two terabyte solid state drives as well. However, numbers like release dates or suggested retail price are not in the offing as yet.
Is Intel a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on INTC stock based on one Buy, 21 Holds and five Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 59.57% loss in its share price over the past year, the average INTC price target of $24.53 per share implies 22.16% upside potential.
