Intel's stock has struggled this year. Now the company is upping its AI game.

By Emily Bary

Intel made a series of AI announcements in a bid to capture more spending in red-hot market

Intel Corp.'s stock has missed out on the artificial-intelligence trend so far this year, but it's headed higher in Tuesday's premarket action after the company made a series of AI-chip announcements.

The company said Tuesday that it was launching its Xeon 6 processors, which are meant for data-center applications. The chips are designed to bring "performance and power efficiency for high-density, scale-out workloads," Intel (INTC) announced in a press release.

Additionally, Intel said its Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 AI accelerator kits can come at up to a third of the cost of comparable platforms. "The combination of Xeon processors with Gaudi AI accelerators in a system offers a powerful solution for making AI faster, cheaper and more accessible," Intel's release noted.

Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger called Intel "one of the only companies in the world innovating across the full spectrum of the AI market opportunity - from semiconductor manufacturing to PC, network, edge and data center systems."

Intel shares were up 1.5% in premarket trading Tuesday after falling 40% on a year-to-date basis through Monday's close, making it the S&P 500's SPX third-worst performer over that span.

Though the stock performed well last year, rising 90%, it's missed this year's AI rally as Wall Street has questioned how the company's traditional dominance in central processing units will position it as graphics processing units play a starring role in AI applications.

Intel's last earnings report, which brought a downbeat outlook, had Wall Street wondering when Intel's bottom would come. Additionally, Intel recently broke out its manufacturing financials separately from its product financials, giving investors transparency into two businesses with different economic profiles. But those disclosures also reinforced the steep losses that the foundry business is seeing.

The latest announcements from Intel come in conjunction with the Computex trade show in Taiwan. Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) were among other chip companies that presented at Computex in recent days.

Read: Nvidia's stock is responsible for a third of the S&P 500's gains this year

-Emily Bary

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06-04-24 0820ET

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