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Once mighty Intel fights to find a floor

The shares are up more than 10% over the last three days.

2/12/25 12:22PM

Shares of Intel, once the champion of American chip-making, have perked up in an interesting way this week.

Over the last three days, the stock is up more than 10% — its best three-day run since November — and has leap-frogged its 50-day moving average, a trend line that suggests a modicum of stability. The surge in the stock comes amid comments from Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday in which he vowed that AI chips would be made in the US. (Most of such chips are currently made in Taiwan.)

Whether Intel can hold these levels is an open question. Since the end of 2023, it has repeatedly broken through support on its way to losing roughly 60% of its market value. That equates to a paper loss for shareholders of almost $120 billion. But given how important the market seems to view political linkages to the current administration, if Intel becomes associated with the Trump-related push for domestic chip-making, the stock might finally find its footing.

Matt Phillips37m

Micron jumps on report of surging memory chip prices

Micron, the US memory chip specialist, is up more than 4% in early trading Monday after a report that Samsung Electronics was temporarily pausing new pricing on contracts for the latest version of ubiquitous short-term computer memory: Dynamic Random Access Memory, or DRAM. The chip giant wants to see where the market settles after a recent spike in spot prices for memory chips driven by the AI boom.

DRAM and memory chips of all sorts have pricing power because of how much demand is outpacing supply. Last week, South Korean memory chip behemoth SK Hynix said it had already “sold out” all of its 2026 production.

Exclusive: Samsung delays DDR5 contract pricing to mid-November as spot prices triple

Luke Kawa1h

Nvidia gains as two new AI deals this morning underscore demand for its flagship chips

Nvidia is off to a hot start this week, up about 3% as of 9:40 a.m. ET, as the chip designer continues to be the beating heart at the center of two fresh AI deals announced on Monday morning.

IREN is going to be outfitting a Texas data center with Nvidia GPUs that will be purchased from Dell and utilized by Microsoft.
Amazon Web Services is providing OpenAI access to “hundreds of thousands” of Nvidia GPUs as part of a $38 billion deal for computing power.

Texas wants a piece of Wall Street

With its long-teased stock exchange, TXSE, winning SEC approval in September, the state is taking aim at a market long ruled by just two giants.

Hyunsoo Rim1h

Luke Kawa2h

Beyond Meat delays release of earnings as management tries to figure out how big of a write-down to take

“You don’t want to see how the sausage is made” is an expression that appears to apply to meat, faux meat, and faux meat accounting.

Shares of Beyond Meat are tumbling after management delayed the formal release of its quarterly results as they try to pin down exactly how big of a loss to take on assets that aren’t worth as much as they previously thought.

The plant-based meat company was slated to release its quarterly update on Tuesday after the market closes, but is postponing this report until November 11.

“As previously disclosed on Form 8-K filed on October 24, 2025, the Company expects to record a non-cash impairment charge for the three months ended September 27, 2025 related to certain of its long-lived assets. Although the Company expects this charge to be material, the Company is not yet able to reasonably quantify the amount, and requires additional time, resources and effort to finalize its assessment,” per the press release.

In that 8-K, the company said an accounting recoverability test “preliminarily indicated that the carrying amount of certain of its long-lived assets was not recoverable from the projected undiscounted future cash flows of the relevant asset group.”

In other words, an initial review showed that certain plants, property, and equipment won’t make the kind of money that their previously reported value implied, so that needs to be marked down in the form of a noncash impairment charge. The outstanding question is how big that charge will be.

Beyond Meat made that announcement along with the preliminary release of its Q3 results and some positive commentary on ongoing legal matters.

Luke Kawa2h

Cipher Mining soars after revealing a $5.5 billion deal with Amazon to provide AI data center capacity and power

Cipher Mining is soaring in premarket trading amid another massive deal announced this morning between a bitcoin miner turned data center company and a hyperscaler.

Along with its Q3 results, CIFR revealed a $5.5 billion, 15-year pact with Amazon to provide capacity and power for AI workloads. Cipher will deliver 300 megawatts’ worth of capacity in two phases next year, and expects to begin collecting rent for this deal in August 2026.

This is Cipher’s “first direct lease with a Tier 1 hyperscaler,” CEO Tyler Page said, and comes a little over a month after the firm booked a 10-year hosting agreement with AI cloud platform company Fluidstack, with Google amassing a 5.4% equity stake in Cipher as part of the transaction.

As for those Q3 results, Cipher posted adjusted diluted earnings per share of $0.10, far better than the expected 5.4-cent loss, on revenues of $72 million, which were shy of the $76.5 million consensus estimate.