Intel's fabs may at long last be worth all those billions of dollars

After several years of uncertainty, job cuts, issues with self-destroying CPUs, and spending billions of dollars on its foundries, Intel has made big strides in moving into a better place. Thanks largely to its latest products and deals with other tech and AI giants. Investors certainly seem to think so, because its market cap is now the highest it has been in more than two and a half decades.

As reported by Tom's Hardware, you can see the figures yourself and easily spot that the last time Intel's market capitalization was above the $300 billion mark was all the way back in October 2000. According to CompaniesMarketCap, the site tracking the figures, this makes Team Blue the 47th most valuable company in the world, though just by market cap and nothing else.

In comparison, AMD is currently enjoying a cap of $385 billion, and Nvidia is miles ahead of either company, with a market cap that's approximately $4.5 trillion in size. However, this is all somewhat of an unfair comparison, because neither of those firms have their own manufacturing plants for CPUs and GPUs, whereas Intel does.

You'd think that this would result in a higher market cap, but for the majority of Intel's history, it's only ever made chips for itself, and those fabs have been a serious financial drain in the past. But now that it's agreed to be part of Elon Musk's Terafab project, there's a chance that Intel's numerous foundries could be busy creating or packaging AI chips for SpaceX and Tesla.

Intel has already recently agreed to a chip deal with Google, and along with how well its Panther Lake and Arrow Lake 200S Plus chips have been received, it would seem to suggest that investors believe that the 57-year-old company is on the right track to regaining its former glory.

It's certainly faring better than other US-based chip companies, such as Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, which are either relatively static or currently on a bit of a slide, in terms of market cap.

Chasing down manufacturing orders seems to be what investors are most interested in Intel doing right now, probably because no matter what its desktop CPUs are like (or what they do to themselves), Intel's overall processor market share is still pretty dominant. AMD is certainly making headway in the world of server chips, though, and when it comes to PC gaming and consoles, Team Red rules the roost.

A healthy AMD and Intel is good news for consumers, because having just one company utterly dominate a market isn't great for competition (*cough graphics cards *cough). Investors are perhaps less concerned by this, but they're certainly happy with how things are going at Intel right now.