Intel could be in for more upside — even after Friday’s surge to all-time highs, according to Dan Niles, founder of Niles Investment Management. “I think you want to be biased long over the long term,” the hedge fund manager said Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” Intel shares surged more than 22% in Friday’s session and notched a fresh intraday high. The chipmaker is on track to register one of its biggest one-day gains in its more than five decades. Intel blew past analysts’ expectations on both lines in the first quarter. Intel is benefiting from booming demand for its central processing units, a product known as CPUs that is key to powering agentic workloads. INTC 1D mountain Intel, 1-day Investors have taken a particular interest in Intel since the U.S. government took a stake in the stock last year. Shares have surged around 275% over the last 12 months. Niles, who listed Intel as his largest holding at one point this month, called CPUs an “orchestration engine.” While he said CPUs were “given up for dead” as the AI industry initially focused on graphics processing units, they are now “at the beginning” of a growth story. “You’re only a few months into this agentic stuff,” Niles said. “You should see very strong demand — at least, I think, for the next year — as corporations put more agentic workflows in.” Wall Street is largely on the sidelines after the stock’s big run. The average analyst has a hold rating and price target insinuating shares can fall more than 32%, according to LSEG. Niles acknowledged that Intel is “ridiculously expensive” as a stock. But he said Intel looks similarly to how Nvidia did a few years ago. Nvidia shares have soared more than 670% over the last three years. “Let’s face it: Intel’s been a dead stock for a decade or so,” Niles said. “It’ll take a while for sentiment to change and for people to … really buy into this.”
