IntelINTC

was one of the worst-performing stocks on Wall Street last year, falling 60% — a performance so bad that the chipmaker ceded its decades-long position in the Dow to high-flying competitor NvidiaNVDA

. And to start 2025, the situation isn’t looking much better — with the company’s final earnings report of 2024 showing a 2% decline in full-year revenue, an $11.6B annual loss, and a number of delays and canceled products.

Despite that, it’s up 29% to start the year.

What could go wrong? At the core of Intel’s problems is a costly effort to reshore American semiconductor construction with new semiconductor plants — its first in decades. The new plants, which are projected to cost some $30B each, cost Intel dearly in 2024. The firm’s Foundry business burned more than $13.4B in 2024 alone, outstripping the billions of dollars in subsidies from the CHIPS Act. And Intel’s spend-a-thon is set to continue for the coming years as it continues to scale up its foundry business. But investors are seeing a way out for the company — a deal.

• Spinoff and acquisition rumors are once again making the rounds, with speculation that Intel could sell itself — either in full or piece-by-piece — to competitors.
• Disposing of its foundry business could also free up (whatever is left of) an encumbered Intel to focus more on AI, where the company is seen falling behind other industry peers.

Sell Out

The discussions are still considered “informal” per WSJ, but BroadcomAVGO

is reportedly interested in Intel’s chip design and marketing segment, while Taiwan SemiconductorTSM

is interested in the factories. However, there are numerous blockers on any deal that could see the chipmaker broken up.

• For one, the Trump administration considers Intel “critical to national security,” and they would likely be unsupportive of a foreign entity controlling important semiconductor infrastructure in the US, per comments.
• And second, competitor AMDAMD
  would likely hold all the cards in a potential sale because of a decades-long cross-licensing agreement on the companies’ x86 architecture.

On the path: The recent bump inINTC

has offered some investors an opportunity to exit, especially if they’d been accumulating in hopes of a deal. Longer-term investors, burned by the company’s innumerable missteps, might be holding on to see whether Intel goes it alone or looks to make the most of recent rumors. But as the firm looks to separate its manufacturing business from the company at large, struggles to find a new CEO, and struggles to juggle its consumer chip business and partnerships with AI aspirants like AmazonAMZN

, it looks more likely by the day that this great American giant is on the bidding block — whether they admit it or not.