What if you bought Intel in 1990?
US Tech · Chips. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play44.4× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Intel at the start of 1990 would be worth about $44,444 today — 44.4 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Intel spent the 1990s as half of the Wintel duopoly, its 'Intel Inside' stickers on almost every PC and its manufacturing considered the best in the world. The shares rose more than fortyfold over the decade, peaking in 2000 at a valuation the business would never justify again. The dot-com crash more than halved them, and for the next twenty years Intel was a highly profitable company with a stock that moved sideways.
The real damage was strategic. Intel declined to make the chip for the original iPhone, missed the smartphone era almost entirely, and from the mid-2010s fell behind TSMC in manufacturing after repeated delays at its 10-nanometre process. AMD took share in PCs and servers, Nvidia captured AI, and Apple replaced Intel processors in Macs with its own. Pat Gelsinger's expensive plan to turn Intel into a contract foundry ended with his departure in 2024, the dividend was suspended, and in 2025 the US government took a stake of roughly ten percent. Then came a sharp rebound: in 2026 the shares finally climbed above their 2000 peak, more than a quarter century later.
The lesson: Market leadership is not permanent; Intel's manufacturing edge looked unassailable for decades and eroded through a handful of missed bets and execution slips.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $0.9 | $44,444 | $19,429 | 44.4× |
| 1995 | $3.90 | $10,256 | $14,783 | 10.3× |
| 2000 | $41.00 | $976 | $4,626 | 1.0× |
| 2003 | $16.00 | $2,500 | $7,727 | 2.5× |
| 2005 | $23.00 | $1,739 | $5,763 | 1.7× |
| 2007 | $20.00 | $2,000 | $4,789 | 2.0× |
| 2008 | $25.00 | $1,600 | $4,626 | 1.6× |
| 2010 | $20.00 | $2,000 | $6,071 | 2.0× |
| 2012 | $25.00 | $1,600 | $5,312 | 1.6× |
| 2015 | $36.00 | $1,111 | $3,301 | 1.1× |
| 2018 | $46.00 | $870 | $2,519 | 0.9× |
| 2020 | $60.00 | $667 | $2,092 | 0.7× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $44,444. The S&P 500 from that same year: $19,429.
On this day
- 22 March 1993: Intel introduces the Pentium
- 6 June 2005: Apple announces a switch to Intel chips
- 18 July 1968: Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore found Intel
- 1 November 1999: Microsoft and Intel join the Dow
- 15 November 1971: Intel advertises the first microprocessor
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Intel is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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