Intel and Arm Stocks Are Jumping. Thank Meta’s Muse AI Agent.

Intel stock is up 194% this year through Friday’s close. (Photo by I-HWA CHENG/AFP via Getty Images)

Key Points

• Intel, Arm Holdings and AMD shares rose early Monday on investor excitement about CPU growth driven by Meta Platforms’ Muse AI agent.
• Meta’s Muse has been the most downloaded free iPhone application in the U.S. for three consecutive days, according to Sensor Tower.
• Autonomous AI agents boost demand for CPUs to run inference, which Arm estimates could help the server CPU market reach $120 billion by 2030.

Intel and Arm Holdings were gaining early on Monday as investors got excited about potential growth of central-processing units. The trigger looks to be the popularity of Meta Platforms’ Muse artificial-intelligence agent.

Intel was up 5.6% in premarket trading and Arm’s American depositary receipts were rising 4.6%. Advanced Micro Devices was rising 3.3%.

Intel is one of Barron’s picks for 2026 and is up 194% this year through Friday’s close, and up 278% over the past 12 months.

After a blistering run early in the year on the back of CPU demand to power AI services, Intel and Arm fell back in the second half of summer. But the early success of the Muse agent—which has been the most downloaded free application on the iPhone in the U.S. for the past three days according to Sensor Tower—is reigniting excitement.

The point about AI agents which can act autonomously is that they massively boost demand for chips to perform inference, the process of running models—and that needs CPUs. Arm has estimated the server CPU market can grow at over 35% annually, reaching $120 billion by 2030. AMD is more optimistic—it projects server CPUs could grow 50% through 2030, creating a $220 billion revenue opportunity.

Agents have already had something of a moment this year with the viral success of OpenClaw, an open-source AI assistant project. However, OpenClaw could be tricky to set up for users without technical knowledge and its chief developer was subsequently recruited by OpenAI. Muse is a lot more accessible and Meta has a lot more developers to throw at improving its capabilities.

“In our view, Meta’s distribution and data advantage give Muse an advantage on day one,” wrote KeyBanc analyst Justin Patterson in a research note. “If Muse can build a monthly (and ideally, daily or weekly) audience in the hundreds of millions over the coming months, we believe this would be deemed a success.”

And if Meta booms then so will CPU demand—which is good news for Intel, Arm and AMD.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8