Citi raised its price target for Intel stock to $130 per share for the remainder of 2026 [1].
This adjustment signals a shift in how analysts view the semiconductor landscape, suggesting that the rise of agentic AI is creating a larger market for traditional processors than previously expected.
The firm previously set the price target at $95 per share [2]. At the time of the note, Intel stock was trading at around $107 per share [3]. Citi maintained a Buy rating for the company while updating its outlook in a semiconductor note issued Monday [2].
According to the analysis, the primary driver for the target increase is the accelerating demand for server CPUs and agentic AI workloads [4]. This demand is expected to significantly expand the total addressable market (TAM) for CPUs, reshaping the broader semiconductor industry outlook [4].
Citi projects a substantial increase in the CPU TAM over the next several years. The firm estimates the market will grow from $29.3 billion in 2025 to a range between $131.5 billion and $132 billion by 2030 [5, 6]. This represents a 35% increase in the market's scale over that period [5].
Intel is positioning itself to capture this growth as AI agents require robust processing power to operate. The shift toward agentic AI, systems that can act autonomously to achieve goals, is driving a renewed need for high-performance server hardware [2, 4].
“Citi raised its price target for Intel stock to $130 per share”
The upward revision of Intel's price target reflects a broader market realization that AI growth is not limited to GPUs. By forecasting a massive expansion in the CPU total addressable market, Citi suggests that the infrastructure required for autonomous AI agents will revive demand for the central processing units that form the backbone of data centers.
