This article first appeared on GuruFocus.
Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), the data-center and personal-computing chipmaker, became one of the market’s hottest AI-adjacent trades as investors bet that faster adoption of autonomous agents such as Meta’s Muse could expand demand for general-purpose computing. Shares surged 9.1% to $118.50 on Sept. 21, putting the stock sharply higher as investors looked beyond GPUs to the CPUs needed to keep increasingly complex AI workflows running.
Muse operates through its own virtual computer, allowing the agent to browse, execute tasks and continue working even after a user closes the application. That matters for Intel because persistent AI agents do not run on accelerators alone. They also need CPUs to manage operating systems, data movement, orchestration and the steady background workloads surrounding model inference. If agentic AI becomes a larger part of everyday computing, the CPU opportunity could grow alongside the accelerator boom rather than disappear beneath it.
The valuation picture shows just how aggressively investors are pricing that possibility. At $118.50, Intel trades 269.04% above GuruFocus’ GF Value estimate of $32.11, leaving a massive gap between the market price and the platform’s estimate of intrinsic value. That makes execution the real test: Meta’s Muse is not an Intel design win, purchase order or revenue guarantee. Intel still has to turn rising agent workloads into Xeon deployments, stronger utilization and profitable sales before today’s optimism becomes operating results.