Stop Buying Intel. You’ve Missed the Train. Buy This Instead

Omor Ibne Ehsan

Tue, May 19, 2026 at 10:26 AM EDT 4 min read

Quick Read

• Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) controls 72.3% foundry market share with AI and HPC representing 61% of Q1 2026 revenue, trading at a 26x forward P/E with 58% year-over-year profit growth and 62.3% gross margin. ASML Holding (ASML) is the sole supplier of EUV lithography machines with $45.06 billion year-end backlog, FY 2026 revenue guided to $42.47-47.19 billion, and a 12 billion euro buyback program through December 2028.

• Intel’s foundry ambitions face an entrenched supply chain dominated by Taiwan Semiconductor and ASML, which together control the critical infrastructure that no competitor can replicate or bypass.

• The analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 stocks and ASML wasn't one of them. Get them here FREE.

Intel is having a moment again, with the Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) turnaround story dragging retail money back into a name that has spent the past four years as a cautionary tale. But the two companies that already won the war Intel is still trying to fight deserve your attention more.

The analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 stocks and ASML wasn't one of them. Get them here FREE.

I think the Intel trade is sort of over.

The pitch on Intel is that the foundry business will finally work, that 18A is real, that the government money cements it, and that you are early. You are not early. The stock's 50-day moving average sits at $69.50 against a 200-day at $44.79, which tells you the retail crowd has already done the buying. The fundamentals underneath that move are a trailing EPS of negative $0.60, a profit margin of negative 5.9%, and quarterly earnings growth of negative 71.7% year over year. You are being asked to pay a forward P/E of 156x for a company whose recent "beats" come against estimates analysts had compressed to a penny per share. A 2,800% surprise on a one-cent estimate is just arithmetic on a tiny denominator.

And the analyst community knows it. The consensus target is $85, against 30 hold ratings, 3 strong sells, and only 2 strong buys. That is a Wall Street shrug while retail pays up. Meanwhile, the part of the chip cycle that is actually compounding has nothing to do with whether Intel's Ohio fabs hit yield.

The company actually building the AI chips

Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE:TSM) is the root of the AI GPU supply chain, and saying so is closer to bookkeeping than to a hot take. It trades much more cheaply than Intel and arguably has more upside from here, because there's no alternative to this giant with an unshakeable moat. Three things matter, and they matter in order.