Intel is moving to raise the size of its planned stock offering from $15 billion to roughly $20 billion after the deal drew more than $100 billion in investor demand, according to people familiar with the matter. Shares fell about 5% in premarket trading Monday when the chipmaker first announced the $15 billion underwritten common stock sale, before demand proved strong enough for underwriters to push the target higher within the same trading day.
Intel's own announcement said proceeds would go toward general corporate purposes, including capital expenditures and working capital, as the company works to keep pace with surging AI compute demand. The offering is expected to price around $95 per share, roughly a 6.5% discount to Friday's close, and underwriters have a 30-day option to purchase an additional $2.25 billion in shares on top of the upsized deal.
A reversal after years of buybacks
The raise marks a notable turn for a company that has historically returned capital to shareholders rather than sought it from them: Intel has spent an estimated $82 billion buying back its own stock over the years. Now, with revenue growing at its fastest pace in nearly 15 years and capital-expenditure guidance hiked to roughly $20 billion for the year on the back of strong customer demand, the company is tapping equity markets instead to fund the buildout — a sign of how capital-intensive the AI infrastructure race has become even for an incumbent chipmaker.
Related: Nvidia Lines Up $500B in Wall Street Financing for AI Buildout
Part of a much larger financing wave
Intel's raise is a relatively modest piece of a far larger trend: Wall Street has been arranging hundreds of billions of dollars in financing for AI data centers and compute capacity across the technology sector this year, from chipmakers to cloud providers to, increasingly, former Bitcoin miners repurposing their power contracts for AI hosting. The $100 billion-plus order book for Intel's stock sale suggests investors remain willing to fund that buildout even as questions persist about how quickly the spending will translate into durable returns.
