英特尔拟发行150亿美元新股，为1971年以来首次公开售股

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I'm looking up shares of Intel. Nora, congratulations on owning this stock as a US taxpayer.

I mean, I guess we all do.

I guess we all do. Uh, shares down about 3% today. The company plans to offer $15 billion worth of new stock. It could be its first public share sale since the company listed all the way back in 1971. and it's a bid to extend its comeback and capitalize on the AI boom. Ian King is Bloomberg News US semiconductor reporter. He joins us from our San Francisco bureau. Ian, I I want to just cut right to this. Um, big deal, not a big deal.

I mean, it's a big deal in terms of Intel's recovery. Obviously, if you're an existing shareholder, you're not too keen about being diluted, but

Well, we all are, I guess.

Yeah, [laughter] exactly. On the flip side of this though, Intel is really doing what other large technology companies have already done, which is say, "Look at these incredible valuations we're enjoying. Maybe we can take some money out of the equity market." Um, and that will protect us on the other side of the the balance sheet when and basically not, you know, endanger our our, you know, debt situ, you know, ratings and and not really stretch that kind of balance sheet with with too much more debt in order to fund go what we're trying to do going forward.

Okay, that's that I'm so glad you brought this up because that's the part of the balance sheet that I want to talk to you about in a in a time when we're talking about, you know, uh, Alphabet raising $25 billion by tapping the debt market. Also doing, you know, these some of the Mag 7 doing share sales, too. What is it about Intel's balance sheet and its debt that load right now that sort of makes it make sense to to do an equity sale rather than tap the the debt market?

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean that's that's for Intel in particular, that's an extremely important question. And you'll remember under its previous CEO spent, you know, like a like a drunken sailor, basically building all of these new factories, trying to get into the AI race, trying to become, you know, a chipmaker for everybody in the manufacturing side. Didn't bets that didn't really pay off that had to be kind of reigned in by the current CEO Luke Bhutan, who made it his kind of first order of business to clean up that balance sheet.

And he's done some work on that. They've still got a lot of debt, but they have a lot more cash than they used to now. So, there's some more strategic freedom coming in there. Um, and really what with this equity raise, what he's doing is creating more strategic freedom without kind of going back on that promise to clean up the finances.

I mean, this is a stock that hit a high of $141 just back in June. Now, we're seeing the stock sitting at about uh what $98 a share, but it's also been on a tear up about 167% year-to date. But talk to me a bit about some of the pressures that this company has been facing if you know we're not looking at that large year-to- date gain.

Yeah. No, I mean that the pressures it's facing, you know, still exist, right? None of them have gone away. It's got a little bit of a windfall from this AI boom because some of its generalist chips, CPUs have become part of the story, but it really hasn't done anything in terms of differentiating itself, coming out with new products that are really, you know, kicking a hole in the ceiling and causing disruptions in the market.

It's not really taking market share from Nvidia or AMD as of yet. It's just kind of had a windfall. Um, and that gives it, I think, a little bit more latitude to sort of get in the game. The other thing it's trying to do is is to find outside users for this factory network that it has built because can't fill them itself. Um has to sort of build more capacity has to be ready at a kind of moment's notice to be able to build out capacity to help them and help itself to an extent.

So that's really you know a lot of the challenges the fundamentals are still really in place and then they really have to be sorted out going forward and cash helps right. Well, how much money, Ian, does Intel have to spend in order to to build the facilities that it needs to to get to market what it thinks is the future of its company?

Yeah, I mean, that's a very good question. $15 billion is is a lot of money for me. Not much for somebody on TV like you, but [laughter] really

I didn't know you were going to say that, but it does feel like it does feel like 15 billion is not a lot of money when we talk about capex and when we're we're talking about the context of AI. But for the record, that's a lot of money for me.

[laughter]

It it I mean it's about half of what a leading edge factory built from the ground up to completion in terms of being equipped and ready to go would cost. So sounds like a lot of money, but it really isn't.

So we should anticipate, I assume, the company taking on uh potentially more debt or tapping the equity market or doing something uh in another fashion later down the road as we still cons continue to see this company really trying to scale.

We'll we'll we'll see. I mean I think [clears throat] the you know what investors have liked about this new management team is if they said look we're not going to do this build it and they'll come kind of speculative kind of borrowing and building. We're going to have firm orders. We're going to have firm commitments from customers and then we'll do it. So potentially yes in terms of tapping new financing but only at least if we take them at their word when they are sure that those bets will pay off when that money will be repayable in in short order.

I mean, how many CEOs has Intel had while talking about publicly about a turnaround? Is three, four?

Yeah. I mean, this was Brian Krzanic was the last CEO that, you know, was a CEO of Intel that was at the peak of its powers, rapidly lost its way. Um, obviously he was ousted. Then we had Bob Swan. uh you know then we had Pat Gellzinger and now we've got Lib Bhutan who was sort of brought in because the turnaround that Pat Gellzinger promised wasn't really materializing as fast as some had hoped. So yeah, we we we've heard you know enough of the story and we now need to see more of the action and to be fair to the current management team that is kind of their strategy as well in terms of we're not going to talk about it until we can actually do it.

Well, they don't need to talk about it because we're the ones. We can talk about it and I can ask you questions about it. Uh you've been covering this company for a long time. And if we were thinking about it maybe in a the metaphor of uh baseball for example, and we're talking about a nine inning game at at this point in 2026, where do you think we are in in Intel's turnaround?

You're going to ask somebody English for a baseball metaphor? [laughter]

Should we do should we do like a soccer game? I don't know.

I don't know. I mean, Let's we it it's got three things it needs to do. Clean up the balance sheet, improve its own products and get them in the AI race and find outside customers. It's done one of those three things. It's products are improving, but they're still not taking back market share. Still doesn't have those big customers. So, a third of the way through. Is that fair enough?

Yeah, I I I'll accept that as an answer.

You know, we'll take it.

Yeah. [laughter] So I mean when we're thinking about sort of outside investments, we know that the US government of course is involved with

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