Why Goldman won't pick Intel over its rivals just yet

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) initiated coverage of Intel Corp. (INTC) this week with a neutral rating and a $150 price target, based on TipRanks' report. That implies only about 12% upside, modest given the stock's run over the past year.

The bigger signal is who wrote it, not the number itself.

Goldman analyst James Schneider upgraded AMD to buy from hold seven weeks earlier, hiking its target to $450 from 240, implying 27% upside, according to CNBC.

He used nearly identical reasoning both times, citing demand from agentic AI workloads. For AMD, that thesis earned an upgrade. For Intel, it only earns a hold.

Part of the hesitation traces back to what Intel still is. It built its business selling processors as physical hardware, a model built around manufacturing scale rather than the AI compute platforms Wall Street now pays for.

AMD and Nvidia spent the past decade reorienting around data center accelerators, while Intel is only beginning that shift, making Goldman's caution easier to understand than to dismiss.

Schneider's case for Intel rests on its foundry ambitions and its role as a domestic chip champion amid Washington's push for onshore manufacturing, he wrote in th

Fuente original: Yahoo Finance (https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/why-goldman-wont-pick-intel-213300883.html)