While Nvidia is winning the AI revolution, Intel has stood painfully still
While Nvidia is up 3000% in the past decade, Intel is almost unique among semiconductor companies in failing to grow from the AI boom.
Twenty six years ago Intel launched the i470, a chip it hoped would be its entry into the growing graphics processor industry. But when the i470 flopped, Intel decided instead to focus on its bread and butter: the central processing units that had essentially put the Silicon in Silicon Valley.
It’s hard for Intel investors to imagine what may have been different had the company more doggedly pursued its GPU ambitions.
Nvidia’s decision to modify its graphics processors, originally designed for gamers, to become “AI accelerators” has caused its stock to boom 3000% over the past decade. Meanwhile Intel’s share price (and $131 billion market cap) is well below its record peak set in 2000, and awkwardly close to its 1998 level.
To have not performed as well as Nvidia, which is on a once-in-a-generation rally, is nothing to be embarrassed about. But Intel is almost unique in the semiconductor industry for benefitting nothing from the market's excitement over all things AI. Since the launch of ChatGPT in November of 2022, Qualcomm is up 69% and TSMC 82%. AMD, Micron and Broadcom have more than doubled. Intel is down about 3%.
