Intel shares jumped 10% on Wednesday after the U.S chipmaker announced it would repurchase the 49% equity interest it did not own in its Fab 34 chip facility in Ireland for $14.2 billion.

The semiconductor company sold the 49% stake in its Ireland manufacturing facility to buyout firm Apollo Global Management in 2024 for $11.2 billion.

“Our 2024 agreement was the right structure at the right time and provided Intel with meaningful flexibility, enabling us to accelerate critical initiatives,” Intel CFO David Zinsner said in a press release. “Today, we have a stronger balance sheet, improved financial discipline and an evolved business strategy.”

The move is a sign that the company is back on solid footing with renewed confidence.

When Intel sold its stake in 2024, it was a very different time for the U.S. chipmaker. The company was in the midst of a $100 billion investment to expand chipmaking in the U.S., including a massive chip fabrication plant, or fab, that opened in Arizona last year.

After years of falling behind chipmaking leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., former CEO Pat Gelsinger went all in on Intel’s foundry ambitions in the U.S. He was ousted at the end of 2024, but Intel’s Arizona chip factory project remained on track.

Intel said the repurchase agreement is “underpinned by the growing and essential role CPUs play in the era of AI.”

Intel is known for making industry-leading PC and server central processing units, or CPUs, but has a different business model from most chipmakers.

While other leaders like Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia outsource the complex and expensive manufacturing of their silicon, Intel both designs and manufactures its own chips — with hopes of manufacturing for others, too.

At Fab 34 in Ireland, Intel manufactures PC and server CPUs using less advanced chip nodes than what it makes in Arizona, but a renewed need for CPUs is driving demand across the board.

Intel told CNBC that its strongest demand right now is for server CPUs, including its latest Xeon 6 CPU made in Ireland.

Nvidia recently told CNBC that CPUs are “becoming the bottleneck” as agentic artificial intelligence changes compute needs.

Futurum Group called it a “quiet supply crisis,” predicting the CPU market growth rate could exceed the growth of GPUs, or graphics processing units, by 2028.

While GPUs are ideal for training and running AI models because their thousands of cores can perform many operations simultaneously, CPUs have a smaller number of powerful cores running sequential general-purpose tasks. Agentic AI requires a lot of general compute power, with large amounts of data moving around across multiple agents.

In the latest signals of the CPU renaissance, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled an entire rack filled only with Vera CPUs earlier this month, and U.K. chip architecture firm Arm Holdings introduced its first in-house chip — also a CPU.

Intel now manufactures chips at its most advanced node, 18A, in Arizona but has yet to secure a major external customer. For now, Intel is its own primary customer, making its Core Ultra series 3 PC processor at that plant.

In Ireland, Intel makes earlier generations of its PC processor, and manufactures its latest server CPU on Intel 3, the generation preceding 18A. 

Intel 3 is the second generation of chip technology that the company makes using ASML‘s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. These EUV machines are also used to manufacture 18A, opening up the possibility that Intel could produce more advanced chips in Ireland down the road.

Intel told CNBC there are no plans for 18A at Fab 34 in the near term. 

The Ireland fab is also crucial to a different step in the chipmaking process called advanced packaging, which is required to connect the individual chips to larger systems like a circuit board. Intel told CNBC it does a portion of the advanced packaging for its 18A chips at the Ireland fab.

Correction: David Zinsner is CFO of Intel. An earlier version misspelled his name.

Cryptocurrencies rose Tuesday amid a late surge in optimism around the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s decisions on spot ether exchange-traded funds applications, the first of which is due this week.

Ether led the rally, rising 12% to $3,785.42, according to Coin Metrics, after rocketing 20% on Monday.

“This sudden flip in expectations is an unexpected boon for investors who have been crying out for a driver after the [Bitcoin] halving passed and bitcoin ETFs were launched in the U.S. and Hong Kong,” said Antoni Trenchev, co-founder and managing partner of Nexo. “If the spot ETH ETFs are approved, altcoins should take off as ether is often a leading indicator for the rest of the crypto market.”

Meanwhile, bitcoin added 2% and was trading at about $71,350, extending an 7% gain from the previous day. The flagship cryptocurrency has been rising since last week’s April CPI reading showed inflation eased from the previous month, which could open the door again to rate cuts in the U.S. This week’s rally has pushed bitcoin above $70,000 for the first time in more than a month.

Crypto-related equities rode the wave. Coinbase and Robinhood, plays on trading of cryptocurrencies broadly, each rose about 2% in premarket trading, adding to Monday’s gains of 8% and 9%, respectively. MicroStrategy, which is more of a proxy for the price of bitcoin, added 1%. Bitcoin miners also gained slightly, with Riot Platforms and Iren (formerly known as Iris Energy) each advancing 2%, and Marathon Digital and CleanSpark each ticking higher by 1%.

The rally began suddenly on Monday, amid reports that the SEC has requested key document updates from potential ETF issuers and exchanges. A spokesperson for the SEC said the agency doesn’t comment on individual filings.

Now, investors are reconsidering the likelihood that the SEC might greenlight spot ether ETF applications. The previous consensus was that the SEC would not likely approve the funds, based on the lack of engagement by the agency on the filings. By contrast, in the weeks leading up to approvals for bitcoin ETFs, the SEC was reported to be engaging actively with fund issuers.

Final decisions on applications by VanEck and Ark Invest are due this Thursday and Friday, respectively.

BlackRock, Fidelity, Invesco, Grayscale and Bitwise Asset Management also have applications awaiting decisions this year.

An Ethereum ETF approval could put an end to the lull in crypto, according to Trenchev – which several investors and analysts had expected to last another three to five months.

“Crypto’s been in a slumber since March, and we’re still in that sideways space,” he said. “We need [bitcoin] to break through the record high before we can say categorically that we’ve broken out of the range.”

“Bitcoin should rise on the coat-tails of Ethereum if we get an approval, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves,” he added. “One month doesn’t make a summer. We’re in a data-centric market. If we get a hot CPI number or a really strong jobs report, you could see the lull continue.”