Intel Prices $20 Billion Stock Sale at $95, Below Monday's Close

Intel priced its stock offering at $95 a share and upsized it to $20 billion on Tuesday. Intel increased the offering from the $15 billion announced Monday, with people familiar with the matter saying investors sought multiple times the shares available. That raise comes while Intel's external foundry business remains a small part of Foundry segment revenue, most of which still comes from Intel itself.

The Aug. 11 pricing covers 210,526,315 new shares and should yield roughly $19.7 billion after fees, compared with about 5.04 billion Intel shares outstanding at the end of the second quarter. The new shares represent roughly 4% of that quarter-end count before any purchases under the banks' 30-day option. Underwriters have a 30-day option to buy about 31.6 million additional shares at a price equal to $95 less underwriting discounts. The stock closed Monday, Aug. 10, at $97.52, down 4.1% that day after ending the prior Friday at $101.65. The sale is expected to close Aug. 12.

Intel said the proceeds are for "general corporate purposes," which may include capital expenditures and working capital. The filing does not disclose what the money buys, names no project and identifies no customer. Intel raised its 2026 capital spending forecast in July from $18 billion to more than $20 billion. Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner said most of the increase would go toward factory tooling and that Intel was preparing for a "meaningful increase" in 2027. At the end of the second quarter, Intel held about $29.7 billion in cash and short-term investments against $50.5 billion of total debt, up from $46.6 billion at the end of 2025. Intel had also issued $6.5 billion of senior notes in April 2026, with coupons ranging from 4.65% to 6.20%.

Data Center and AI revenue rose 59% year over year to $6.26 billion in the second quarter, while operating income increased to $2.47 billion from $633 million a year earlier. The Foundry segment generated $5.77 billion in revenue for the period, up from $4.42 billion a year earlier, with external foundry, assembly and test revenue at $293 million. It posted a $2.09 billion operating loss, narrowed from $3.17 billion in the second quarter of 2025. Most of the year-over-year external revenue increase came from Altera becoming an external customer after its 2025 deconsolidation, rather than solely from new third-party wins.

Intel committed in July 2026 to high-volume production on 14A in 2028 and has said the process could go unbuilt without a major external customer. Intel itself has publicly named no external 14A customer. "The external foundry business that justifies this capex is still a rounding error, and the equity being sold today is funding capacity for customers who have signed nothing public," Adam Button, a markets writer at InvestingLive, wrote. Button added that Intel "doesn't have a great track record of executing on large projects on budget or on time."

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said Intel went "a long way to wrecking its own balance sheet and prospects by focusing on financial engineering rather than physical engineering, courtesy of $82 billion of share buybacks in the 2010s." Raising money now "makes perfect sense," he said, "especially after a five-fold increase in the stock price since last August."

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Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai