Investing.com’s stocks of the week By Investing.com

The key second-order shift is not simply that Intel beat; it’s that AI infrastructure spending is starting to reprice toward a more balanced compute stack. If hyperscalers are adding CPU count alongside accelerators, the market may have underappreciated how much legacy x86 content gets pulled back into the AI capex cycle, creating a catch-up trade in CPU vendors and adjacent silicon. That favors Intel tactically, but also implies a more selective read-through for any company selling “AI” exposure without direct accelerator leverage.

Texas Instruments strength suggests the semi market is rewarding cyclicals with cleaner inventory and pricing discipline, while software is being punished for even modest execution slippage. The market is effectively applying a higher discount rate to recurring revenue stories if management commentary hints at demand friction or usage elasticity; that raises the bar for every enterprise software name into earnings. This is a classic dispersion regime: hardware with visible demand and operating leverage can rally hard, while software with any cost or demand miss gets de-rated immediately.

The contrarian risk is that the current move in Intel may be too much, too fast if the quarterly outperformance is still mostly a sentiment reset rather than a durable earnings inflection. Over the next 1-3 months, the stock can keep running if guidance revisions and channel data confirm CPU share gains; over 6-12 months, the key test is whether this is margin-accretive growth or just revenue growth bought with capex and mix dilution. For software, the selloff may have overshot near-term fundamentals, but the multiple compression is likely to persist until investors see proof that AI-driven productivity spend is translating into net new budgets rather than replacement spend.