Intel Raises Billions, Apple Sticks With Glass iPhone

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. Bloomberg Tech is live from the heart of Silicon Valley with Ed Ludlow in San Francisco.

**Ed Ludlow** (0:23)
This is Bloomberg Tech coming up. It's an upside share sale for Intel, raising $20 billion, a third more than it was targeting when it announced the deal yesterday. Plus, sources tell Bloomberg Apple's glass-centric iPhone overhaul is still on track for 2027, after an analyst's report said it had been canceled. And drone startup Neros raises $250 million in a funding round that triples its valuation. We'll talk to Neros CEO, Sorin Monroe Anderson, one of its lead investors, Sequoia partner, Sean Maguire, later this hour. Intel gets big demand for its share sale flat in Tuesday's session on a two-day basis as a decline of 4%. Remember, this is a stock that's up 164% year to date, also seeing its value almost triple. $20 billion sold in the end. They had initially marketed $15 billion.
There was probably about five times that in terms of demand, Bloomberg reporting citing sources. Let's get more. Bloomberg's Ian King, who leads our semiconductor coverages with us.
Let's go back over the basics. Intel said we will sell $15 billion worth of stock. In the end, they sold 20 Where did they price it? What did demand look like?

**Ian King** (1:30)
Yeah, I mean, demand is obviously strong. Our reporting says that as many as a third of the people who tried to buy the stock weren't able to do so. So obviously, this is a strong endorsement of the future prospects of this company, that they're able to attract new shareholders. We're seeing in the market, obviously, some of the existing shareholders don't like being diluted. But in general, this is a pretty strong signal that Intel is going to be joining the AI race and that people believe that.

**Ed Ludlow** (1:57)
Why do they need to sell stock? What do they need the $20 billion for?

**Ian King** (2:01)
Yeah, I mean, the number one priority of this management team has been to sort out this balance sheet, right? They've got about $50 billion in debt. Up until this offering, they had about $30 billion in cash. Obviously, that situation is improving.
This takes them very close to being sort of net cash positive, which is a real turnaround from where this company was just a couple of years ago, and obviously gives them a much more solid footing to do new products, to build new factories.

**Ed Ludlow** (2:27)
We're recapping what we talked about 24 hours ago, basically, but that's because the deal's now been done.
We said in the Bloomberg story, this was the first time Intel did a public share sale since 1971 when it listed different company now. Part of this is they are a bit more adventurous with CapEx, and you explained that yesterday. They have to buy chip making machines.

**Ian King** (2:51)
Right, I mean, 20 billion is a lot of money, maybe not for somebody who works on TV, but for us print reporters, it's a huge amount of money. But in the grand scheme of things, if you are trying to do leading edge semiconductor manufacturing, $20 billion doesn't really even get you a full factory from the ground up, right? So huge numbers, and that kind of factory goes away within five years. It's not as useful as it used to be.

**Ed Ludlow** (3:15)
Now, very quick, this is not a GPU story. This is a CPU story.

**Ian King** (3:20)
That's right. I mean, Intel has joined the kind of the party by accident in a way, because the way that the AI factories are working, the way that the software is being run is kind of shifted back towards general computing, and that's where Intel's strength is. There's a shortage and a lot of demand for what they make.

**Ed Ludlow** (3:38)
$20 billion is a lot of money and a big number for Bloomberg's Ian King. Let's take a look at today's official big number, $500 billion.
That's how much capital NVIDIA is looking to mobilize from US investment giants Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR. The idea, Wall Street raises debt backed by NVIDIA Compute, then leases that Compute to customers, according to a Bloomberg source. It effectively turns GPUs into a financeable infrastructure asset. Our next guest says that the AI infrastructure buildout is among the key factors driving markets, and our global economy is being reshaped for the next phase of the industrial revolution. BMO, Wealth Management Chief Market Strategist, Carol Schleif joins us now. So, the idea in this story is Compute as collateral. How do markets digest that?

**Carol Schleifer** (4:33)