Intel ripped higher after President Trump posted on Truth Social that "Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its Chips in America." INTC jumped roughly 10.5% to about $133.82 shortly after the open, touching a record $135.13 intraday, while Apple moved only about 0.6%. Note the caveat: as of this morning neither Apple nor Intel has officially confirmed the deal, though the WSJ first reported a preliminary agreement back in early May.
Index futures pushed higher into the open as Wall Street clawed back ground lost after the Fed, in Kevin Warsh's first meeting as chair, signaled a possible rate hike this year — nine of 18 members projected one. S&P 500 futures were up 0.8%, Dow futures up 0.4%, and Nasdaq 100 futures up 1.4%. Chip strength led the bounce.
The Intel-Apple headline lit up the whole semiconductor space before the bell. Micron (MU) gained 4.8%, AMD rose 3.9%, and Broadcom (AVGO) advanced 3%, with the Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF (MAGS) up 0.43% to $64.86. The move marks a sharp sentiment reversal after last week's chip-sector wobble.
Storage stocks were among the biggest premarket movers: SanDisk (SNDK) surged 11.1%, Western Digital (WDC) climbed 10.3%, and Super Micro Computer (SMCI) rose 8.1%. WDC's run has been staggering — roughly a 1,100% total return over the past year — fueled by AI storage demand and tight supply. A separate WDC-for-SanDisk share exchange is set to close around June 22.
Micron reports fiscal Q3 on June 24, and the setup is hot: the stock has climbed nearly 50% over the past month into trillion-dollar territory. Analysts have been hiking targets aggressively — TD Cowen to $1,500, RBC to $1,200, and Aletheia Capital to $1,600. Shares saw some profit-taking earlier this week, slipping about 6.2% on Tuesday to $1,020.76.
The U.S. government awarded $500 million to startup SandboxAQ — backed by Nvidia — to develop new chemicals and materials for domestic chipmaking, including PFAS replacements and rare-earth-free magnets and batteries. The Commerce Department will take a minority, non-voting stake. SandboxAQ was valued at $5.75 billion in April 2025 and has raised over $1 billion to date.
Alongside the Apple news, Trump reiterated that Nvidia had agreed to manufacture chips with Intel and floated a massive facility tied to Elon Musk's TerraFab project. He claimed the government's 10% Intel stake is now worth more than $60 billion. Nvidia had already finalized a roughly 4%, $5 billion common-stock stake in Intel at $23.28 per share.
Nvidia traded around $208 into this morning, off near-term highs but still carrying overwhelmingly bullish coverage — 59 buys against a single sell, an average 12-month target near $298.93. For fiscal 2026, revenue hit $215.94 billion, up roughly 65% year over year. The stock is steady rather than spiking, a relative calm spot in a noisy chip tape.
The enterprise-AI software battle is splitting. Palantir is down about 19% year to date, trailing the S&P 500's roughly 10.5% gain, even as revenue grew 85% year over year in its latest quarter — an 11th straight quarter of accelerating growth. Oracle, meanwhile, posted 84% cloud-infrastructure growth in fiscal Q3 and carries about $553 billion in backlog.
On the private side, Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, leapfrogging OpenAI — a steep jump from a $380 billion mark just three months earlier, led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia. OpenAI is reportedly filing confidentially for an IPO with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, targeting a September debut at $730–850 billion. Neither is publicly traded yet — flagging as a watch item.
