Jim Cramer's CNBC club will sell Intel and buy AMD as Intel guides $15-16 billion, below $17 billion expected

Two Intel▼−4.19% — Intel, down 4.19 percent today numbers landed a day apart, and they point opposite ways. On November 13, Mercury Research, the firm whose quarterly tables track chip shipments, showed Intel taking five points of desktop CPU share back from AMD▼−10.90% — AMD, down 10.90 percent today ². On November 14, Jim Cramer's CNBC↗ Investing Club, the service built around his charitable trust's portfolio, said it will sell its Intel holding and buy AMD↗ ¹. The club has the better read: the share gain shows Intel shipping into a market that shrank, not buyers choosing Intel.

Intel shipped more desktop chips because laptop demand let it

Mercury said it is "difficult to know the driver of this for sure," and speculated that weak laptop demand let Intel steer product into a desktop market it had under-supplied earlier in the year ². Both vendors saw mobile chip shipments fall more than 10% in the same quarter ². A two-company share table↗ always sums to 100, so when the market is shrinking, the percentages show who shipped into the decline ³.

Intel's guidance contradicts its share table

Intel's own forecast settles what the share table cannot. The company guided fourth-quarter revenue to $15–16 billion↗, below the $17 billion analysts expected, and finance chief David Zinsner said the PC slowdown will run "at least through the first half of next year" ⁴.

An explosion at the Kiryat Gat fabrication plant in Israel adds about $600 million of lost sales across two quarters, including 10-nanometer server chips ⁴⁵. The cause runs back to AI: hyperscalers, the giant cloud operators building data centers, have bought up the memory supply, and PC buyers are waiting out the prices ⁵, the wave we tracked when Intel's memory warning hit Hewlett Packard Enterprise▼−4.99% — Hewlett Packard Enterprise, down 4.99 percent today. The stock is down 42% in a month ⁵.

The trade follows the CPUs that run AI agents

The club's stated reason is flexibility. AMD's chip designs let it move capacity between PC and server processors, and data centers need CPUs to run AI agents ¹. That split already shows inside Intel's own quarter: client computing shrank while data center revenue rose 78% ⁴. Software that runs AI agents, such as OpenAI'sPVT$1.18T — OpenAI, private, latest valuation $1.18T Dots, leans on CPUs to orchestrate work in the cloud ⁴.

AMD has guided its current quarter to about $17 billion↗, which would put it ahead of Intel for the first time ⁶. Even the bull case published the same day, a Seeking Alpha upgrade on the investment research site↗, rests on that data center growth and an Nvidia▼−3.21% — Nvidia, down 3.21 percent today partnership whose products and revenue "remain ahead," not on the desktop table ⁷.

The next Mercury release is the test the share table sets for itself: share that stays elevated confirms the supply story, and a quick reversal means the gain was a one-off in shipment timing ³. Intel's foundry build-out will be funded by data center chips, not desktop share, and the club's swap is a bet that more of that money goes to AMD.