SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Facing a ballroom of analysts who had flown in to learn how the company planned to make money, Intel executives on Wednesday assured investors that the chipmaker “absolutely” has ways, then spent the next 40 minutes gesturing toward a slideshow.
“We have ways,” said Craig Bellweather, Intel’s executive vice president of monetization pathways, standing beside slide 14, which consisted of the word WAYS in 96-point type above an arrow pointing up and slightly to the right. “Several ways. Some of them are on this slide. Some of them are on the next slide. And some of them are, frankly, so exciting that we can’t put them on a slide.”
Asked to name one, Bellweather raised a laser pointer and moved it in a slow circle around the upper-right corner of the screen, a region that contained no text, no numbers and, according to three analysts seated in the front row, “a faint watermark of the company logo, maybe.”
“Right there,” he said. “You see it.”
The briefing followed a quarter that Intel described as its best in years. On Oct. 29 the company reported third-quarter revenue of $16.5 billion, up 21% from a year earlier, driven by demand for data center chips. Its foundry business, which manufactures chips, posted an operating loss of about $1.85 billion, which the company noted was smaller than the $2.3 billion it lost in the same quarter last year. Executives called the improvement “momentum.” Analysts called it $1.85 billion.
Path To Profitability: The Investor Deck
Click through the deck exactly as analysts saw it. If anything is unclear, press “Ask for specifics.” Management is happy to take your question.
Management confidence is non-GAAP and excludes reality, one-time items, and items that occur every time.
Investors may be forgiven for wanting detail. Over the past year the company has acquired a set of shareholders that includes the United States government, which took a 9.9% stake in August 2025 at $20.47 a share; Nvidia, which bought $5 billion of stock at $23.28 a share the following month; and SoftBank, which put in $2 billion. “Our investor base is diverse,” Bellweather said. “Taxpayers, a competitor and SoftBank. Between them, they represent every human emotion.”
Several slides drew particular attention. Slide 9, titled “Synergies,” listed one bullet, which read “(TBD).” Slide 11, a bar chart titled “Number Go Up,” had no y-axis, which Bellweather said was “to give the numbers room to grow.” Slide 17 showed a sunrise over a field in New Albany, Ohio, where Intel is building a chip plant the company said early last year would not be finished until 2030 at the earliest. The slide was labeled “Coming Soon.” The field was labeled “Fab.”
Executives also highlighted the company’s 14A manufacturing process, which Intel has said it may not fully pursue unless it lands a major outside customer, a condition Bellweather described as “a way, pending.” “Fourteen angstroms,” Bellweather said, letting the figure hang in the air. “An angstrom is one ten-billionth of a meter. That is how small our losses are going to get, relative to the size of the universe.”
“What you are seeing is a technique we call the Vague Point,” said Dr. Lorraine Okonjo-Hale, who studies executive body language at the Institute for Forward-Looking Statements. “You extend the arm about 30 degrees and open the hand. Never a finger. A finger is a commitment. Then you sweep left to right, which in Western cultures reads as growth. If you sweep right to left, the stock drops 3% and nobody knows why.”
Bellweather was especially firm on artificial intelligence. The term appeared 61 times across the 31-slide deck, which he said was “more than any competitor’s deck, by our own count, which we also made.” Asked how AI would make Intel money, he said the company would “sell into the demand,” then clarified that the demand was “out there,” and pointed, with the laser, toward the exit.
He also reminded the room that the company has made money before, in an era he referred to only as “the good years,” and that the ways used then were “still in the building somewhere.” A spokesperson later confirmed that a team had been assigned to look for them.
Generate A Way™
Every way Intel has to make money is assembled from three approved parts. Spin to produce a new one, then add it to Slide 14 for the next investor day.
Implied value is calculated by multiplying confidence by the number of ways, then adjusting for anything that would make it smaller.
The question-and-answer session lasted 11 minutes. Priya Venkataraman-Shaw, a semiconductor analyst at the firm Halverson Brecker, asked whether management could “walk us through the path to profitability.”
“Happy to,” Bellweather said, and walked from one side of the stage to the other.
A second analyst asked when, specifically, the foundry business would break even. Bellweather said the company was “not going to give a date, but we are going to give a vibe,” and advanced to slide 22, which consisted entirely of the forward-looking statements disclaimer. At 11 pages, it was the longest slide in the deck, and the only one that used numbers.
Outside the ballroom, investors appeared satisfied. “They have ways,” said one portfolio manager, who asked not to be named because he had not been shown any. “You don’t put the word on a slide that big unless you mean it.”
At press time, Intel shares had risen 4% on the news that there were ways, and the company had scheduled a follow-up investor day at which it will reveal what the ways are. The event is planned for the back half of 2028. A slide announcing it read “SOON,” with an arrow.
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