New York, February 27, 2026, 18:13 (EST) — After-hours
- Intel shares were little changed into the close, then edged lower in after-hours trading.
- A leadership change at Intel’s foundry operation kept attention on execution and turnover.
- Chip stocks ended the week under pressure as investors turned more defensive.
Intel Corp shares dipped in after-hours trading on Friday after finishing the regular session slightly higher, as traders kept one eye on a fresh change at the company’s foundry business. Intel was last down about 0.4% after hours at $45.45, after closing up 0.3% at $45.61. 1
The move itself was small. The backdrop is not. Intel’s push to build a contract chip-manufacturing business — making chips for outside customers, not just its own designs — has become a quick test of management stability as much as technology.
That matters now because investors have been quick to punish anything that looks like slippage in “execution,” a catch-all word for hitting manufacturing targets, winning customers and keeping the plan coherent. It is also a bad tape for semiconductors when rates and inflation are in the foreground.
Intel’s shares fell 3% on Thursday, snapping a brief winning streak and leaving the stock in a choppy patch heading into month-end positioning. The stock finished that session at $45.46. 2
Qualcomm on Thursday said it hired Kevin O’Buckley, who had been senior vice president and general manager of Intel Foundry Services. Intel said its foundry unit remained “one of Intel’s highest strategic priorities,” and that it was focused on “disciplined execution and delivering for customers” under Naga Chandrasekaran’s leadership. 3
O’Buckley is set to start at Qualcomm on March 2, reporting to Akash Palkhiwala, Qualcomm’s executive vice president, CFO and COO, according to Data Center Dynamics. 4
The competitive noise is rising too. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been talking up CPUs — the central processing units that Intel and AMD have long dominated — as AI workloads shift from training to deploying “agents,” software that can carry out tasks on its own. “We love CPUs as well as GPUs,” Huang said, and analyst Ben Bajarin at Creative Strategies said that kind of computing “is happening more and more … on the CPU.” 5
Broader markets offered little help on Friday. U.S. stocks ended lower as investors moved into more defensive corners of the market, with a hotter-than-expected Producer Price Index reading reinforcing the idea that the Federal Reserve may stay patient on rate cuts. “We were reminded there are still some cracks out there,” said Ryan Detrick, chief market strategist at Carson Group. 6
But the risk for Intel holders is more specific than a bad day for chips. Any further senior departures — or any sign the foundry plan is losing focus — could weigh on the stock at a time when rivals are pushing hard into the data-center stack and investors are less forgiving about timelines.
The next hard checkpoint is Intel’s next quarterly update. Intel has not confirmed the date, but Wall Street Horizon lists April 23 as the current estimate for the next earnings report after the market close. 7
