Citi resets Intel stock price target for the rest of 2026

Atif Malik ranks third among more than 12,000 analysts tracked by TipRanks. He has an 80% success rate and an average return of 46.7% per rating over a one-year timeframe. When he publishes a note built on a new market model, Wall Street pays attention.

On May 18, he published one on Intel. And the number it produced is not what most investors are expecting.

What Citi changed on Intel and the new model behind it

Citi analyst Atif Malik raised his price target on Intel to $130 from $95, maintaining a Buy rating, according to TipRanks. The prior $95 target had itself been a significant upgrade from April 24, when Citi moved Intel from Neutral to Buy at $95 following Intel's blockbuster Q1 results. The latest move to $130 represents a 37% increase over that already-elevated level in less than a month.

The raise is driven by a new CPU total addressable market model that Citi introduced alongside the note.

The bank now projects the server CPU market will reach $132 billion by 2030, according to Investing.com. That projection incorporates increased data center sales estimates based on the updated CPU model and potential gains from Intel's ASIC business, including its Mount Evans IPU used by Google and Anthropic, Investing.com confirmed.

The agentic AI argument driving Citi's CPU thesis

"We are constructive on CPU demand as the industry moves to inference and agentic AI which need more CPUs," Malik wrote in the research note.

That argument is the core of what Citi is calling a "CPU renaissance." The thesis holds that agentic AI, software that acts autonomously rather than simply responding to prompts, is more CPU-intensive than the earlier wave of large language model training and inference workloads, which were primarily GPU-intensive. As enterprises deploy AI agents that need to coordinate, reason, and execute across multiple tasks simultaneously, the demand for high-performance CPUs in data centers is expanding in ways the market had not fully modeled.

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Intel is positioned to benefit from that trend in two specific ways. First, its Xeon server CPU line is the dominant incumbent in enterprise data centers, giving it a large installed base to defend and monetize as CPU demand grows. Second, its ASIC business, including the Mount Evans infrastructure processing unit deployed by Google and Anthropic, gives Intel exposure to custom AI silicon demand alongside its standard CPU business.