Hurricane Helen May Deal A Death Blow To Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) – TipRanks.com

Did you know that a large part of the chip industry depends on a single road in North Carolina? That road leads outside the town of Spruce Pine, where most of the world's ultra-pure quartz is found. And that road damage from Hurricane Helen could cripple chipmaker Intel ( INTC ), whose shares fell 2.5% in afternoon trading Monday.

Hurricane Helen proved a disaster for large parts of the US Southeast. For example, several cities in Florida exist as nothing more than an idea. The town of Spruce Pines, in particular, took it on the chin as the main road to the tiny mining town was battered by the hurricane. More than two feet of rain fell across the region causing power outages and many roads were impassable.

Without spruce pine mine quartz, the entire chip industry could be left reeling. There are other places to get quartz—which is used to melt polysilicon—but not the quality that spruce pine produces. Without that quartz, the chip industry would essentially have to make ultra-pure silicon in other ways, meaning much more time, effort and resources would go into the process.

New specs and AI tools

Intel will also need all that quartz. New reports have emerged surrounding its Arrow Lake processor line, and it's showing some serious potential. TechRadar revealed that the new Aero Lake line, specifically, the Core Ultra 9 285 is a 24-core processor with a base speed of 2.5 GHz and a peak speed of 5.6. But reports have spotted something wrong with the tests, as the regular 285 proved to be significantly different than its unlocked counterpart.

Intel is putting more into its AI operations, bringing out a new type of recovery-augmented generation (RAG) approach to help improve the cost-effectiveness of AI. Because using RAG reduces cost and complexity—it removes the need to tune a large-language model, and that makes it much more valuable to its end user.

Is Intel a Buy, Hold or Sell?

Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on INTC stock based on one Buy, 26 Hold and seven Sell ratings assigned over the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 33.54% loss in its share price over the past year, INTC's average price target of $25.47 per share implies a 9.55% upside.

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