Its clear everyone’s eyes are on this stock so we’ll break down what is going on in the SpaceX options chain but also examine some of our favorite names in the broader market and we’ll give you exactly what we are eyeing ourselves.

SpaceX -

So first up the big name on the market this week. Options trading just began for SpaceX today and we can already see some pretty incredible things going on so let me break it down for you. First off what is the overall sentiment around this company according to the options market? Short answer: VERY BULLISH!

We saw a call-to-put ratio of 1.4 on this first day which implies a strong bullish sentiment behind the company as the market is very clearly expecting a upward trend in SpaceX. The majority of the volume of calls/puts traded expire July 17 (1 Month till Expiration) with these investors hoping to capitalize on this very volatile stock.

The most popular call strike price is $260 with a volume of 38,677 contracts traded and the most popular put strike price is $135 with a volume of 13,158. So as you can tell the market is expecting HUGE moves in the stock given how wide these strike prices are.

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• We saw huge de-escalation with the war in the Middle East.

• The United States randomly stopped strikes, after it was reported that Iranian Officials offered a framework for a peace-deal, in which the United States had accepted

• The reason it hasn’t been formalized is because of the long transfer times of messages going back and forth, sometimes stretching days.

TODAY:

• After this de-escalation, the need for rate-hikes is almost certainly off the table. Albeit, a formalized agreement materializes

• Watch for a breakout to $725 on the

• If we can sustain $725 in the first 15 we should be good for vast breakout to the upside, post SpaceX IPO

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Nebius -

Nebius was just added to the Nasdaq after hours June 11th, strengthening an already strong stock we’ve been eyeing for months. In particular it will be very important to watch how it moves at open as it is currently up to $236 after hours from its close at $222. Nebius as of June 11th has IV’s for its June 12 contracts at 130-140% so the market is pricing in huge moves of the stock and by June 19th sitting around 120% so if you are a call/put buyer on Nebius you would have to hope it makes a massive move to be profitable.

Overall Rating: Very High IV - High Risk - If you are going to invest in Nebius look to purchase only long dated calls if price is around 230-235 to avoid huge IV crush and theta decay - selling spreads can capitalize on high premiums

Invesco QQQ Trust -

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Introduction

Quantum computing for decades was just a thought experiment; in the 18 months preceding this article, it evolved into something tangible; an engineering program with verified results, peer-reviewed studies, and 10s of billions of public and private capital flowing into this new scientific breakthrough.

However, there is a high amount of confusion regarding what quantum computing actually is and also what industries it can benefit in the future. So in this thesis, we will break down what Quantum Computing actually is, the current trajectory of the sector, and how it all ties in with the current investment landscape surrounding it.

Pillar 1: Science of Quantum Computing

The science of Quantum Computing is extremely complex, and this would turn into a 1000-page textbook if I explained every detail, so I will provide a simplified explanation of the basic principles of Quantum Computing that will become relevant in later parts of the thesis.

Classical Computers store information in bits, which can hold a state of either 0 or 1. Every program ever made runs on this framework. Quantum Computing replaces bits with Qubits, these Qubits can occupy the state of 0 and 1 simultaneously, which are described by two numbers called amplitudes and this state is called superposition. This is the foundation on which all the power of Quantum Computing lies, as it simply allows for an exponentially higher level of computing compared to classical computers for certain specialized tasks.

However, since these qubits exist at the microscopic level, they are incredibly sensitive to the environment around them. Things like temperature changes, vibration, or electromagnetic radiation can scramble their state and result in errors far more often than any typical transistor. The solution to this is Quantum error correction (QEC), combining Logical qubits and Physical qubits to counteract errors from destroying the original encoded data. But how does it do that?

Logical qubits are the software-defined unit of data, and Physical qubits are the physical hardware pieces (like trapped ions or photons) that exist in the processor but are also highly sensitive, as stated. So the single logical qubit encodes its information to many different physical qubits so that if one goes out of whack, the system can recognize and correct the one qubit’s error without having to destroy the original data. A good analogy takes us back to the medieval times, when there was no email, so all messages had to be delivered face to face, but entrusting just one person to travel great distances, kingdom to kingdom, delivering a message was risky because if something happened to them, then the entire message chain collapsed. What they would do is send 10 different people off to deliver the same message to lower the risk of a complete failure. Quantum computing leverages the same principle, encoding the data amongst many different physical qubits so that if one strays, it is easy to correct that error without risking the entire piece of data being lost.

In Quantum computers, each logical qubit requires hundreds to thousands of physical qubits to ensure widespread errors are not a concern. Although this protection mechanism is also the #1 reason behind Quantum Computing’s limitations, the scale needed to minimize errors is huge!

Pillar 2: The Quantum Computing Frontrunners

Now that we have the basic understanding of Quantum computing under our belt, we can get into the fun parts, the companies that are on the front lines of this new emerging technology.

They are separated into 2 distinct categories: The Pure Plays (companies whose entire company is quantum) and the Tech Giants (companies that are cash-rich with great underlying business who are also pursuing Quantum). Let’s start with the Pure Plays.

Pure Players: IonQ, Rigetti, D-Wave, Quantinuum, PsiQuantum

IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) is the largest pure-play by revenue and the first to go public. Its trapped-ion systems reported a record 99.99 percent two-qubit gate fidelity in 2025, and the company has assembled an aggressive roadmap, targeting 10,000 physical qubits by 2027 (following its purchase of Oxford Ionics) and two million physical qubits by 2030. IonQ’s 2025 acquisitions (Oxford Ionics, Lightsynq, Capella Space, Vector Atomic, a majority stake in ID Quantique, and a pending SkyWater foundry deal) extend it into quantum networking, sensing, and security as well as computing.

Rigetti Computing (Nasdaq: RGTI) pursues a vertically integrated, modular superconducting strategy, assembling larger processors from 9-qubit chiplets in its own Fab-1 facility. Its 108-qubit Cepheus-1 system reached general availability in early 2026 at roughly 99 percent median two-qubit fidelity, and its roadmap targets 150-plus qubits in 2026 and 1,000-plus qubits by the end of 2027 at progressively higher fidelity. Rigetti also supports NVIDIA’s NVQLink platform for tying quantum hardware to AI supercomputers, something we will touch on again later.

D-Wave Quantum (NYSE: QBTS) is the commercial veteran of quantum annealing, a specialized approach aimed at optimization rather than universal computing. Its Advantage2 system, delivered through the Leap cloud, underpins real customer deployments, and its 2025 revenue grew 179 percent to roughly $24.6 million at an unusually high gross margin. In 2026 D-Wave also unveiled a gate-model roadmap targeting 100 logical qubits by 2032, signalling a move toward universal computing.

Quantinuum — formed from Honeywell Quantum Solutions and Cambridge Quantum — is the most valuable specialist, reaching roughly a $10 billion valuation in 2025 and filing to go public, with a Nasdaq listing expected in 2026. Its trapped-ion systems are widely regarded as best-in-class on fidelity.

PsiQuantum, still private at a roughly $7 billion valuation after a 2025 round backed by BlackRock, Temasek, Baillie Gifford, and NVIDIA’s venture arm, is making the boldest single bet: skipping the NISQ era to build a fault-tolerant, million-qubit photonic machine using silicon-photonic fabrication with GlobalFoundries, targeted before the end of the decade.

The Tech Giants: IBM, GOOGLE, Microsoft, Amazon

IBM: IBM has published the field’s most detailed and most consistently executed roadmap. At its November 2025 Quantum Developer Conference, it introduced Nighthawk, a 120-qubit processor with 218 next-generation tunable couplers that allows circuits with about 30 percent more complexity than its prior Heron chip and supports up to 5,000 two-qubit gates. IBM projects Nighthawk-class systems reaching 7,500 gates by the end of 2026, 10,000 in 2027, and as many as 15,000 two-qubit gates across 1,000-plus connected qubits by 2028. Alongside it, the experimental Loon processor demonstrated, for the first time in IBM’s line, all the hardware components it considers necessary for fault-tolerant error correction, and the company reported a tenfold speed-up in QEC decoding, a year ahead of schedule, and a shift to 300-millimetre wafer fabrication to double the development pace.

IBM’s stated targets are community-verified quantum advantage by the end of 2026 and fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2029, supported by its Qiskit software stack and a hybrid model that couples classical high-performance computing (CPUs and GPUs) with quantum processors (QPUs). Among incumbents, IBM also has the deepest enterprise-sales motion, which matters more than raw qubit counts for near-term revenue.

Google: Google Quantum AI’s 105-qubit Willow processor produced the field’s defining 2025 result: the first verifiable quantum advantage, using the Quantum Echoes algorithm built on out-of-time-order correlators, published in Nature and estimated at roughly 13,000 times faster than the best classical method for the task. The word verifiable is doing important work: unlike Google’s contested 2019 “quantum supremacy” claim, the 2025 result is reproducible and connects to a real scientific task, measuring molecular structure via nuclear magnetic resonance, which is why it drew broad, if cautious, validation. Google is careful to note this is a specialized tool, not a general-purpose quantum computer.

Microsoft: Microsoft is pursuing the highest-risk, highest-reward path. Its February 2025 Majorana 1 chip is built on topological qubits, which aim to protect quantum information in the hardware itself and, Microsoft argues, could eventually scale toward a million qubits. The science, however, is contested: independent physicists have questioned whether Microsoft’s claims are actually scientifically possible, and rival executives have publicly doubted the result. If Microsoft is right, it could leapfrog the field; if wrong, it has spent years on an unproven foundation. A reader should treat topological qubits as a genuine option, not an established one.

Amazon: Amazon, through AWS, took a more incremental route with its February 2025 Ocelot chip, which combines “cat qubit” technology with conventional error correction in a design that AWS says could substantially reduce the resources needed for error correction and shorten the path to a practical machine by up to five years. Amazon’s commercial center of gravity, though, is its Braket cloud service, which resells access to many hardware partners, a strategy that earns revenue regardless of which modality ultimately wins.

Source: Aria Research

Pillar 3: Use cases, AI + Data Center infrastructure, Quantum Realities

Quantum computing offers an exceptional advantage for certain specialized tasks and no advantage for others. What tasks will Quantum computing actually be useful for? Let’s dive in…

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• Overnight, we saw escalations with the Iran/US war, which led to a final hour of pain in the broader markets

• A United States fighter jet was struck down over the Strait of Hormuz, although Iran denied responsibility

• Trump pledged strikes, causing markets to spook. After trading hours, it was confirmed by CentCom on X that the United States carried out strikes targeting specific locations.

• This sent broader indexes down heavily. The SPY was down an additional $40 after hours, or 0.55%.

• Trump then stated that the strikes were called off after it was reported that Iranian Officials called him pleading to end the strikes. Trump gave them a 1 day extension to sign the deal or be “bombed.”

• This has now lifted markets after hours, leading the QQQ up 0.7%, and the SPY up 0.41%

Jobless Claims & PPI Scheduled for Today:

• The jobless claims are scheduled for 8:30 am today, and the projections are 220,000, with the prior coming in at 225,000

• A blowout beat to the downside will most likely spook markets the same way the labour report did last week. Anything in line or slightly higher will probably help markets recover, giving more fuel to a relief rally on Friday

• In our opinion at Aria, we believe the only catalysts to worry about from the calendar above are the Jobless Claims. Unless PPI is extremely higher than estimates, this shouldn’t move the needle the way the Jobless Claims will.

Key Levels and Stocks to Watch: (AS LONG AS THERE ISN’T AN IRAN ESCALATION)

• Make sure you pay attention to the QQQ’s

• After the dust has settled from the Jobs Report, a recovery of $700 will help push the rally farther. Pay attention to the first 15 mins for the regain of this level. This is crucial for an intraday tech rally.

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We at Aria Research have compiled a group of key catalysts this week. Citing what actually happened, the key hidden details, and what this means for your money. So without further ado, let’s begin…

Nvidia:

NVIDIA kicked off this action-packed week with their keynote speech at Computex 2026. Jensen Huang gave some key insights into the AI trade, boosting specific companies throughout the speech. Take NBIS, for instance. He referred to them as a “world-class AI cloud company,” noting that they are growing extremely fast. Because of this comment, Nebius proceeded to pop 14% on Tuesday, while being up 176% YTD. Marvell also sustained some intense upward pressure after Jensen called them the next “1 trillion dollar company.” Marvell moved 30%+ after the presentation.

Source: CNBC

During the keynote, Jensen kept mentioning that “Compute is revenue.” Now, if you are familiar with our stance here at Aria Research, we are a firm believer in the “capacity constraint moat.” Jensen essentially reiterated what we have been stating for a while. The demand for capacity will be eating up any new energy that comes online for the coming years, with interconnection queues taking 54 months on average. The most qualified and knowledgeable man in the AI space stated that the most scarce product on the market equates to revenue for the masses. Essentially, the companies that can offer quick “time-to-compute” and “compute capacity” will be the winners in this space. If you haven’t yet, please go read the research paper we wrote regarding Iren and Nebius. We explain in great detail the strategic positioning these companies have to gain exponentially from the capacity-constrained environment.

Source: NVIDIA.com

NVIDIA also revealed their RTX Spark Superchip, partnered with Microsoft on ARM architecture. This is a direct shot at AMD, INTC, and Qualcomm, attempting to take market share within the consumer computer sector. One thing Aria flagged that we find interesting is that NVIDIA is dipping their toes in every layer of the AI stack. NVIDIA pushing ARM-based SoCs is a direct shot at x86. Thus, the reason why the three companies mentioned above traded downward after the keynote.

Broadcom:

Broadcom, after hours on Thursday, released their Q2 2026 earnings report.

Source: Broadom Investor Relations

Q2 revenue $22.2B (+48% YoY); AI semi revenue $10.8B (+143% YoY); AI bookings topped $30B. Guided Q3 AI revenue to $16.0B, growth above 200% YoY. The stock printed a monster quarter, but future guidance failed to dazzle Wall Street, even though Q3 revenue guided 29.4B, above 28.5B. Also, fears arose surrounding Marvell and Media-Tek potentially taking market share of their TPU business. Thursday, Macquarie’s downgrade came from their modelling of Broadcom's share of Alphabet's TPU revenue falling from ~95% in 2026 to 80% in 2027 to 65% in 2028, as MediaTek and Marvell gain a role and Google develops in-house capability.

CEO Hock Tan also gave warnings surrounding their margins. Tan's point regarding margins was that segment margins remain very stable and very solid; it's the mix between software and non-AI versus the very rapidly growing AI semiconductor that's diluting gross margin. In other words, the weighted average falls purely because the lowest-margin bucket is becoming the biggest and fastest-growing slice of the pie.

This dilution is mechanical, not a demand signal. Margins aren't compressing because customers are paying less or pulling back; they're compressing because AI demand is so strong it's outgrowing every higher-margin line Broadcom has. If anything, the falling blended margin confirms the boom rather than warning of its end. What actually sold the stock off was a different set of fears: a reaffirmed-but-not-raised full-year AI target into a stock already priced for a raise, and a Google supply chain that's no longer Broadcom's alone. At Aria Research, we’ve modelled demand to keep booming until at least 2029 as a base case, with the bull cases exceeding 2030 onwards. The data backs up demand only accelerating, not softening, which is why we called this a textbook “buy the dip” opportunity on Thursday.

Intel:

Intel kicked off their action-packed week with their Keynote speech at Computex 2026. Firstly, Intel confirmed their next-gen Xeon 7 chip, “Diamond Rapids,” to be manufactured on their 18A-P node in 2027, which is extremely positive. Many analysts have written about Intel having their yields at 50%, raising heavy issues regarding the future of its foundry. CEO Tan has consistently reiterated that they are increasing yields at 6-8% per month, and their Diamond Rapids chip got rid of any worries regarding yields and future node capabilities, in our opinion.

Source: Intel.com

Intel also leaned heavily on the “AI-everywhere story,” reiterating x86’s deep legacy as the architecture leader, as well as the CPU revival story. Intel presented a live demo of inference requests on a program, showing that the GPU/CPU ratio could reach 1:1, as agentic AI scales and becomes more prominent. Intel had left out any key information regarding their foundry, which is what investors care about most. At Aria Research, we believe more deals are inevitable for Intel’s foundry, as it is extremely bottlenecked. Due to the lack of “foundry talk,” Intel stock saw a pullback.

The Great Market Crash of June 5th 2026:

If you wanted to do some red light therapy, looking at the stock market on Friday last week was the best way to do it. The QQQ was down -4%, the S&P 500 dropped around -2.6%, resulting in 1.5 trillion dollars being wiped from the stock market. This was the first losing week in 10, and the biggest drop since October 10th. The trigger? The labour market, and SpaceX ipo.

Employers added 172,000 jobs in May, more than double the estimate of 80,000. The reason this killed markets is that it got rid of any potential for a rate cut. When the labour market is running really hot, it leads to more money circulating in the economy, resulting in more consumer spending (demand), increasing prices… or, in layman’s terms, inflation. Investors hate inflation, and the only way to combat it is to raise rates. The expectations for a rate hike rose to 66% on Polymarket. This is so pivotal for the AI trade because companies are borrowing a large amount of money for expansion, and when rates increase, it artificially cools growth and the economy. This spooked investors and made them sell out of stocks at an alarming rate. Great companies that we’ve flagged dropped 10%+, such as AMD, INTC, NBIS, IREN, and MRVL.

An important part of this sell-off was the SpaceX ipo. We saw a lot of money flow out of the stock market and into T-bills and sidelined cash. This is extremely important as no money flowed into precious metals like gold and silver. When money flows into gold and silver, this means institutions believe that a recession or large-scale crash is coming. Since this didn’t happen, we can rest assured this was more of a “one-off-flash crash.” The largest IPO ever is occurring on Friday, June 12th, offering at $135 per share, and a 1.77 trillion market cap.

A “once-in-a-decade” offering can make any investor pull sidelined cash and invest in it, and SpaceX is exactly that. When money moves into cash/cash equivalents, it means people are most likely preparing to unleash it. And the timing makes perfect sense. The “dry powder” is unambiguously there, the largest ever, and the SpaceX raise is trivially small against it, so a relief rally is well within the realm of what this cash could fund. What the data does not show is that the cash is already turning over. What this means is that a solid SpaceX IPO could be the trigger for a relief rally in hardware stocks in particular.

Below is a chart showing the amount of sidelined cash and comparing SpaceX's funding against the total cash value. (Split roughly 3 trillion in retail, and the rest institutional)

How to Strategically Play the Upcoming Weeks:

Encompassing everything that occurred, we have learned a few things that need to be addressed, so that we can make informed investment decisions…

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A few years ago, the AI trade was dominated by compute. Companies couldn’t get enough of it. The clear winner? Nvidia. They made the best product tailored to training LLM’s like ChatGPT and Claude. From there, the shift went from training AI to implementing it at the enterprise level. This shift is called Agentic AI, and this is the future. It allows businesses to have artificial agents work alongside employees to streamline operations. Whether it be scanning basic IT tips, reading charts, and analyzing data, these agents can perform tasks effectively.

The caveat is that agentic AI is creating a vast amount of demand for the entire AI stack. That being semi conductors, high-bandwidth memory, NAND storage, advanced packaging, chip fabrication, cloud services, and data centres. The issue is that demand is so strong for the stack that supply simply cannot keep up. The CPUs, GPUs, storage, and memory are being placed into data centres in order to store, process, train, and implement advanced AI models and agents. This is where the bottleneck lies.

The demand for data centres is so vast, and the main players in this trade are all expanding capacity. Albeit, it takes 2+ years from ground being broken to having a fully functioning data centre. These data centres can consume as much power as a small city. Lead times to get energy are sitting at 4-5 years, as grid interconnections are severely backlogged. Everyone is desperately trying to get power, but they simply can’t. There is roughly 2,000+ gigawatts of backlogged energy from interconnections that won’t come online until 2030-2033 (as of May 2026). There is more energy backlogged than the entire United States Grid has online currently.

This leaves hyperscalers and AI companies with two options.

1. They can wait patiently to have more capacity come online, and risk missing out on revenues and potentially falling behind in the “AI race.”

2. They can purchase capacity from third-party vendors who offer it.

This is where the thesis of our memo comes in. Neoclouds like Iren and Nebius are well-positioned to benefit from capacity scarcity and the overall energy bottleneck. Iren, formerly known as Iris, used to be a bitcoin mining company. They own the full stack, meaning they own the land, the data centre, and the compute within it. Iren has 4.5+ GW of secured capacity, which can power roughly 4.5 million average homes. Due to their past, they locked in grid capacity at low premiums and are able to rent it out to companies at a larger premium.

Nebius, on the other hand, was formally the international division and Dutch parent company of Yandex, known as the “Google of Russia.” After the Ukraine war began, they sold all of their Russian assets and pivoted to being a full-scale artificial intelligence company. Similar to Iren, they currently rent their capacity. These two companies alike can benefit immensely from the energy constraint that will be plaguing hyperscalers and blue-chip companies begging to win the AI race.

The Following displays Nebius and Iren’s Market Price at the time of this Memo…

Pillar 1: The Grid Constraint Explained

The expansion of data centres and the need for agentic workloads will only constrain the grid further. Every data centre turned online requires roughly 20-100 megawatts of power (0.02-0.1 gigawatts). This is enough to power 10,000-100,000 households. One data centre being deployed uses as much energy as a small city. This is clearly a problem, especially when the United States grid can support only 1,250 Gigawatts of energy as of today. As mentioned above, around 2,000 gigawatts worth of backlogged energy will be deployed fully between 2030-2033, as a mix of solar power and renewable sources, nuclear, and gas turbines, in order to support the expansion of artificial intelligence.

Lead times stretch from 4-5 years, as the queue to acquire power is extensively backlogged. The simple answer. Interconnections.

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Intel is no longer the same company it was eighteen months ago, and the market is now beginning to realize this. With an extensive history of failed execution and collapsed foundry practices behind them, they have successfully put together a catalogue for the first time that merits a reevaluation. The new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, is on board with changing their companies structure. Alongside the US government and Nvidia, which have taken an equity stake in Intel. As such, their 18A foundry technology is now commercially shipping products with yield improvements being greater than what their internal projections were at. Advanced packaging is also growing into a $1B+ business, and companies that use external foundries are making significant strides in committing to Intel long term.

This stock has already had its fair share of upside (approximately 400% over the last twelve months) as markets begin to digest the operational data that we have been seeing. The question at hand is whether Intel has already “topped out” or if there is any more upside left in the stock. In terms of a baseball game, I believe we are in the early to middle innings in the Intel bull cycle, with the majority of the remaining catalysts yet to come.

The thesis rests on six pillars: foundry customer commitment, their advanced HBM packaging (EMIB and EMIB-T), the geopolitical “floor” as defined by the U.S. Government’s stake in Intel, the roadmap of 18A and 14A technologies, the Lip-Bu Tan operational reset, and the capital expenditures peak that will lead to an inflection point in free cash flow in 2027 & 2028. Altogether, I believe these pillars create immense upside potential for Intel that some analysts are failing to capture.

The Setup: Where Intel Stands Today

Intel’s Q1 2026 revenue was $13.6 billion, up 7% year over year. The Data Center and artificial intelligence revenue increased by 22% to $5.1 billion in Q1 2026. The revenue from Intel Foundry services increased by 16% to $5.4 billion in Q1 2026. The revenue from Client Computing remained steady at $7.7 billion in Q1 2026. On April 18, 2026, Intel issued guidance of between $13.8 billion and $14.8 billion for its second quarter (Q2) earnings. The stock moved 24% in one day following Intel’s reporting of its first-quarter results.

While the headline numbers were important, they were much less important than the shift from the bear case on Intel, which is now required to address specific execution failures rather than vague concerns about strategic direction. Before this time, the bear case was simply “that Intel was a melting ice cube.” Today, the bear case is simply that the recovery has already been priced in. As such, these are very different problems for investors to underwrite, indicating a strong narrative shift on Intel.

Three structural changes happened between late 2025 and early 2026 that the market is still digesting:

1. The US government took a 9.9% equity stake in August 2025 at $20.47 per share, funded through CHIPS Act grants. The total government investment now stands at $11.1 billion, with a five-year warrant for an additional 5% stake exercisable if Intel ceases to own at least 51% of the foundry business.

2. NVIDIA invested $5 billion in September 2025 at $23.28 per share, completing the transaction in December after FTC clearance. The deal includes a joint product roadmap covering custom data centre CPUs and x86 SOCs with integrated RTX chiplets using NVLink.

3. Apple has reportedly signed an NDA with Intel and received the 18A-P PDK 0.9.1GA, with Ming-Chi Kuo estimating production silicon shipping in Q2 or Q3 2027 at volumes of 15 to 20 million entry-level M-series chips annually. The Wall Street Journal confirmed a preliminary agreement in early May 2026.

These three developments anchor the bull case in a way that pure operational improvement cannot. The political, ecosystem, and customer signals are now aligned in a way they have not been since the early 2010s.

Pillar One: The Foundry Customer Commitment Ramp

This is one of the least discussed legs of the thesis since the financial impact will take time to come from this announcement cycle. The external foundry revenue in Q1 2026 was only $174 million. As such, that is a very small percentage of the total foundry revenue at $5.4 billion. Meaning, the majority of foundry revenue comes from internal chip production.

The number bulls should be watching is different. On the Q1 2026 earnings call, Tan disclosed that Intel signed multiple long-term agreements in the quarter for volume and pricing of server CPUs and ASICs, typically lasting three to five years, with several confidential at customer request. The publicly named deal was a multi-year LTA with Google covering both Xeon CPUs and ASICs. NVIDIA also selected Xeon 6 as the host CPU for its DGX Rubin NVL8 systems. The previously confirmed Microsoft custom 18A chip deal remains in development, with Amazon’s AI fabric chip and the Terafab deal with Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI rounding out the publicly disclosed customer set.

CEO Tan has stated that design agreements from external foundry customers will start in the second half of 2026 and will expand throughout 2027. As well, CFO David Zinsner reiterated this, stating that “signals” from customers (outside) will “become more concrete” during the second half of 2026. While any individual name is less important than the overall trend, multiple foundry customer wins accumulate. Winning the first major customer is difficult because you are asking an external customer to invest in a multi-year product development cycle based upon new, unproven manufacturing technology. The Apple deal, if it converts from a preliminary agreement to a signed wafer agreement, would be the validation that unlocks the next wave of customers waiting on the sidelines.

The financial inflection will occur when the company’s external foundry revenues scale from under $200 million on a quarterly basis to $1 billion or more per quarter. This would cause the foundry portion of the business to go from being a $2.4 billion per quarter money pit with no operating income to approximately break-even. In theory, this could happen as soon as the fourth quarter of 2027 or the first quarter of 2028; however, investors usually price it in around twelve to eighteen months before it actually happens.

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