Signage outside Intel headquarters in Santa Clara, California.
Intel Corp. has been suffering from credit rating downgrades in recent years, but today bond investors signaled they are buying into the company's turnaround story. The chipmaker attracted about $50 billion of orders for a $6.5 billion bond sale, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Proceeds of the offering will help Intel buy back part of an Irish chip plant that it had sold off.
For years, Intel has been trying to win back its technological edge after suffering from market share losses for its computer chips. Over time, it saw its credit ratings slip to the BBB tier, a few steps above junk, from the A tier.
In 2025, the U.S. government acquired a stake in Intel as part of an unconventional White House–brokered deal. Last week, Intel signaled it's making progress in fixing itself, delivering a sales forecast that shattered Wall Street's expectations. The need for data center chips to power the nation's massive artificial intelligence (AI) expansion is lifting demand for Intel's flagship Xeon server processors. That type of generalist semiconductor is a renewed focus for companies trying to turn their AI software into services that bring in revenue.
Investors are growing more optimistic that Intel is finally seizing on the surge in AI spending. Today's bond sale had been in the works for some time, but the positive results helped with momentum for the deal, according to a person with knowledge of the sale. The bonds priced at somewhere between 0 and 0.05 percentage point wider than Intel's existing debt, a relatively low concession signaling relatively strong demand. The deal garnered orders equal to about 7.7 times the bonds for sale, compared with an average for deals this year of closer to about 4 times.
Investors' growing hope in Intel's turnaround is also evident in the credit derivatives market, where the cost of protecting the company's debt against default has dropped this month: It was around 0.6 percentage point a year for five years today, compared with about 0.85 percentage point in late March.
Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Barclays Plc, Bank of America Corp., and Deutsche Bank AG ran the bond offering. Representatives for Intel and for the banks either declined to comment or did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Proceeds from today's bond offering will help Intel fund its $14.2 billion repurchase of a 49 percent stake in its Fab 34 joint venture in Ireland from Apollo Global Management Inc. The private equity firm paid $11.2 billion for the stake in 2024, providing cash that Intel said it needed for new production technology at the facility and others in the United States.
The longest-term note in today's five-part offering, due in 2066, yielded 1.3 percentage points more than Treasuries, about 0.35 percentage point tighter than initial price talk, a person said. The issuance was the largest among 12 high-grade offerings and part of an active session in U.S. debt-capital markets today.
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