With production of Core Ultra 300 'Panther Lake' and Xeon 6+ 'Clearwater Forest' ramping at Intel's fab in Arizona, Intel is seemingly on the right track to recovery in the coming years. While it's not out of the woods yet, Intel's market capitalization on Thursday was its highest in over 25 years, or since the dot-com boom went bust, according to CompaniesMarketCap.com.

Intel's market capitalization increased to $305 billion on Thursday, up 3.5X from mid-April 2025, and up 2.8X from August 20, 2025, when the U.S. government announced plans to acquire a 10% stake in Intel. The company is now the world's 48th most valuable company by market capitalization. While it trails ASML, AMD, Applied Materials, Lam Research, and other semiconductor peers, it is well ahead of KLA, IBM, Siemens, and Texas Instruments.

The sharp increase follows Intel's announcement of Google's commitment to use Xeon processors for years to come, which emphasizes relevance of Intel's CPUs; the TeraFab partnership, which gives a nod to Intel's capabilities in design, produce, and package high-performance processors at scale; and a host of various AI-related narratives meant to demonstrate applicability of the company's products in the rapidly growing artificial intelligence sector.

Intel's peak market capitalization was $502.71 billion at the height of the dot-com cycle in August 2000, when the company dominated both PCs and web servers. In today's dollars, that would be around $1.0 trillion. Formally, Intel's current capitalization of $305.25 billion is higher than its $219.1 billion capitalization in late 2003 when the company took the rapidly growing laptop market by storm with its Centrino platform and re-accelerated its growth.

Nonetheless, $305 billion is higher than Intel's peaks in recent years: $257.23 billion in mid-2018 due to Intel's dominance in the growing data center sector $273.43 billion in early 2020 due to the cloud computing boom, and $262.87 billion in April 2021 due to the PC market and cloud computing growth amid the pandemic. That said, Intel is indeed going in the right direction, at least if you ask investors.

Still, Intel's valuation history reflects a transition from a dominating CPU vendor commanding PCs and servers to a mature, execution-sensitive semiconductor company. Intel's market capitalization today is driven more by its strategic narratives associated with AI, foundry, and process technology ambitions, and mid-term product roadmaps than by its earnings. The recent climb toward ~$300 billion indicates renewed investor optimism, but unlike the 2000 peak, this optimism is based on expectations of a turnaround rather than on the already achieved dominance and expectations for skyrocketing sales.

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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.