Intel surges over 13% to $123 as CPU demand rebounds

Intel shares surged more than 13% on Monday to roughly $123 each, reaching price levels last seen in early July. The gain follows an increase of more than 5% last week and marked the chipmaker as a top performer during a broader market rally that pushed the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite up about 2% and the S&P 500 up 1.3%.

The advance was part of an industrywide move across central processing unit makers. Advanced Micro Devices rose 9%, touching a $1 trillion market capitalization threshold, while Arm Holdings jumped more than 15% and Qualcomm gained over 8%. In contrast, GPU-focused chipmakers saw milder gains, with Nvidia up 2% and Broadcom up 1%.

Investor interest in CPUs has reignited following the launch of Meta's Muse personal agent application on Sept. 8, which quickly climbed to the top free app spot on Apple's App Store. While standard generative chatbots rely heavily on AI accelerators such as GPUs and tensor processing units, agentic tasks require multi-step workflows like running code, planning actions, and querying external databases, which rely heavily on CPUs.

Bernstein chip analyst Stacy Rasgon noted on CNBC that broader consumer adoption of agentic tools could drive CPU shortages and demand into overdrive. Beyond server processor sales, market commentators also pointed to Intel's third-party chip manufacturing and packaging businesses as additional avenues to capture upside from AI infrastructure investments.