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The poet T.S. Eliot famously wrote that “April is the cruelest month.” Not for Intel. And May has been even better.The once-beleaguered chipmaker capped off Friday with a huge stock-market run-up after we reported that it had signed up Apple as its newest customer. In the last month, Intel’s shares have more than doubled to an all-time high.
Nine months ago, the chip giant was so down on its luck that the Trump administration swooped in with a rescue package, converting nearly $9 billion in grants into equity and making the U.S. Treasury Intel’s biggest shareholder.
With the government’s backing—and with a lot of help from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and President Trump himself—it’s set to supply chips to Nvidia, SpaceX and Apple. Demand for its data-center CPUs has surged in recent months due to the proliferation of AI agents.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has now made serious progress on his turnaround effort, and the wind is at Intel’s back in a way it hasn’t been for years.
There’s plenty of execution risk ahead, but if Tan can keep signing up customers for Intel’s contract manufacturing business, churn out high-quality silicon wafers and keep the momentum going in its CPU business, the future could be bright for shareholders—including American taxpayers.
—Robbie Whelan is a tech reporter based in Los Angeles.
The Latest From Our Columnists
Julie Jargon: Walking Slower? Why Your Ears, Not Your Knees, Might Be the Problem
If you find yourself walking more slowly than you used to, it might be time to get your hearing checked. An Apple hearing study, conducted with the University of Michigan, confirms a correlation between hearing loss and slower walking speeds. More research now points to one thing, say doctors: If you address your hearing issues, you could live a longer, healthier life.
Nicole Nguyen: Fitness Bands Are Losing Screens—and Gaining Fans
Chunky bands and rings are all the rage, stylish enough that they don’t look like tech—until you spot the glow from their skin-facing sensors.
While the Apple Watch remains the most popular wearable overall, sales of these screenless health and fitness trackers are exploding.
Ben Cohen: The Secret Diary That Has Spilled Into the Musk vs. OpenAI Feud
Imagine how mortifying it would be if anyone ever read your diary.
Now imagine it’s a diary from a stressful period of your life and it’s being read in a courthouse and people all over the world are paying attention because you’re being sued by the richest man on the planet and the future of your company might just depend on your private thoughts that have suddenly become much too public.
Christopher Mims: The Roomba Guy’s Second Act: A Robot You’ll Want to Snuggle
The Steve Jobs of robot vacuum cleaners is ready to unveil his next chapter.
It’s an expressive, furry, doe-eyed creature with huge paws and a dog-like demeanor. He hopes you’ll want to take it home, snuggle with it and cherish it as an essential member of your household.
Big Stories
Meet Anthropic’s ‘Perfect Wingman’ for Its Race Against OpenAI
Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer, is navigating unprecedented growth, compute constraints and the idiosyncratic Amodeis.
Anthropic’s Claude tools are taking off faster than anyone expected and the company is sprinting to lock down more computing capacity—but Rao also needs to make sure it doesn’t end up with too much if revenue slows in the future.
For Palantir, AI Is a Product, a Punching Bag—and a Problem
Palantir Technologies owes much of its recent success to the rise of AI, but that doesn’t mean the company’s leaders like it. “Slop,” executives declared, a total of 17 times, during a call with investors this past week, portraying the outputs of the major AI labs as too messy and unreliable for big enterprises.
🖨️ Tech Ticker
Beijing Billions: DeepSeek is raising money from China-backed investors, with some valuing the startup at around $50 billion.
Spurned Spinoffs: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discussed spinning out the company’s robotics and consumer-hardware divisions late last year, a move intended to give them more room to grow without weighing down the core business.
AI Oversight: The White House is weighing a new government-review process for AI tools the government deems to pose cybersecurity risks, a move that could further expand its oversight of AI in response to Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model.
Other Smart Stuff
The Chinese EV Standard Winning Globally Is Banned in the U.S. (Rest of World)Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Turbulent Bet on AI (FT)The Canvas Hack Is a New Kind of Ransomware Debacle (Wired)
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