Intel Taps AI Boom as Apple Faces Doubts

**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** (0:22)
This is Bloomberg Tech. Coming up, Intel is tapping the market for $15 billion in fresh capital, betting renewed AI enthusiasm can help fund its push into chips and physical AI. Plus, Apple gets a rare downgrade from Jefferies on concerns about its iPhone roadmap. We'll speak with the analyst to discuss why he's turning more bearish. And Microsoft says AI agents are already transforming how software gets built. We'll speak with co-pilot chief Charles LaManna about what's next.
Intel, down 4 percent. It wants to tap the market for $15 billion worth of stock. This will be the first time that it does a public share sale since it listed back in 1971 Let's get straight to it with Bloomberg's Ian King, who leads our coverage of semiconductors. So interesting when this hit the inbox this morning. Let's start with what they're doing. $15 billion is a lot of money. And actually, if you look at what could follow, it could go up $2.25 billion. What do we need to know to start?

**Ian King** (1:25)
Yeah, I mean, you say $15 billion is a lot of money, and that's true, but if you think about it in terms of what Intel has to achieve, which would be building new factories, which cost twice that amount, which would be investing heavily to catch up with NVIDIA and AMD and accelerators, it's not actually that large an amount of money in the grand scheme of things. Obviously, though, investors don't like the dilution that we had this morning.

**Ed Ludlow** (1:49)
This is opportunistic. This is a timing thing, right? The stock tripled so far in 2026 And there has been renewed enthusiasm by investors for Intel's AI story.

**Ian King** (2:00)
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. In a sense, it makes sense for Intel to do this, to go to the equity markets rather than to go back to the debt markets, because it's been trying to clean up that balance sheet, been making progress on that. And investors, part of the reason why its stock has gone up is because it has made progress on cleaning that balance sheet up. So this sort of helps that narrative, albeit in a way that some of the equity investors clearly don't like.
But again, $15 billion, that's a nice amount, but where does it get us?

**Ed Ludlow** (2:31)
You and I were on the phone very recently with Intel's CEO, Lit Butan, and CFO Dave Zinsner, and they gave us this past quarter a capital expenditure number for the year that was bigger than even they had expected. The explanation was kind of like, we will only deploy CapEx if we see a return on it. Talk about some of the projects that Intel's committed to and what it's trying to achieve.

**Ian King** (2:54)
Yeah, I mean, under Lit Butan's predecessor, they built what are called shells, which are the actual physical factories in places like Ohio, in places like Arizona. But they didn't do the really expensive part, which is to buy the equipment and put the equipment in there. Now they're saying, look, for our own stuff alone, we don't have enough capacity. That's kind of a good problem in a way. So they do need to spend more. But the real big step up in spending would come if they get that external customer that they're looking for.
If it's, say, NVIDIA or Apple decides to give them orders, then they'll need that big chunk of change in a hurry to meet that big step up in demand. Haven't quite seen that yet, but this perhaps points us in that direction, makes us feel maybe that they're preparing to do this.

**Ed Ludlow** (3:41)
Intel down 4% in the session, up 165% year to date. Bloomberg's Ian King, thank you very much. Another top story. Shares of Apple have been under pressure. The company was downgraded at Jefferies to underperform from hold with a price target now of $263.66.
The downgrade comes amid concerns over Apple's product roadmap. Jefferies says its supply chain checks suggest an all-glass iPhone, which was expected in September 2027, has been canceled due to low production yields. Here with more is Jefferies' equity analyst, Edison Li. Edison, it's great to have you. Can we start with the supply chain checks? To some people in the Bloomberg Tech audience, you might not be familiar with what it is you guys go out and do. You've looked at the all-glass iPhone. Let's start with that first conclusion that you've drawn.

**Edison Li** (4:30)
Yeah, sure.