Updated with larger raise:

Intel Corp. today announced plans to raise $15 billion by selling common stock. Just a day later, it announced that it upsized the sum to $20 billion.

The banks underwriting the deal have the option to buy up to $2.25 billion worth of additional shares within 30 days. The offering follows a year in which Intel’s stock price more than tripled. That increase reflects investor optimism about its data center and artificial intelligence business, which saw revenue jump 59% last quarter.

Intel didn’t provide a detailed overview of how it plans to spend the funds. The company only stated that its plans “may include, but are not limited to, capital expenditures and working capital.”

Last month, Intel boosted its capital expenditure forecast for the year from $18 billion to more than $20 billion. Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner stated at the time that the company expects additional increases in 2027. He added that the bulk of the capital will go toward chipmaking equipment. 

One section of Intel’s brief stock sale announcement is titled “Why Now.” It states that “physical AI, purpose-built silicon, advanced packaging and external wafers represent significant growth opportunities for Intel.” That may provide clues about how it intends to spend the proceeds from the offering.

Advanced packaging, one of the technologies that Intel listed as a growth opportunity, is used to link together multiple silicon dies into a single chip. The technology can be found in, among other products, AI accelerators. It connects graphics cards’ logic circuits to the high-bandwidth memory stacks in which they keep data.

In March, Zinsner stated that Intel was close to inking advanced packaging deals worth billions of dollars annually. The company may seek to boost its advancing packaging production capacity to meet an expected increase in demand. Its stock sale could make it easier to finance such an initiative. 

Today, Intel mainly makes advanced packaging at a New Mexico facility called Fab 9. In 2021, it committed $3.5 billion to upgrading the factory’s production lines. More recently, the company added three new products to its advanced packaging lineup.

One of the new offerings is a technology called EMIB-T that is expected to enter production this year. Chipmakers often link together a processor’s modules by placing them on a shared base layer called an interposer. EMIB-T replaces the interposer with a smaller, less expensive interconnect. Additionally, it includes power delivery wires that shorten the path electricity must travel and thereby boosts chip efficiency.

Advanced packaging isn’t the only focus of Intel’s engineering efforts.

Last month, the company disclosed that it had started mass-producing chips using ASML Holdings NV’s newest High NA lithography equipment. High NA machines shine light onto silicon wafers at different angles than earlier hardware. That change makes it possible to etch smaller, more efficient transistors.

Now that Intel has validated ASML’s High NA hardware in production, it may seek to bring the technology to more fabs. The stock sale announced today could be conducive to that effort. A single High NA machine cost $400 million as of May 2025.

Photo: Intel