JPMorgan lifted Intel while its Israeli fab leaked again, five days after the blast that killed two workers
Workers sheltered in place at Intel's Kiryat Gat plant on Monday as monitors caught a nitrogen trifluoride leak, five days after a tank failure killed two colleagues. The same morning JPMorgan ended a nearly four-year bear call and the stock rose about 4% pre-market; Intel still has not said whether the plant is running.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
Monday morning at Intel's+5.60% — Intel, up 5.60 percent today plant in Kiryat Gat, southern Israel, the company's own monitoring systems caught nitrogen trifluoride during preparations to remove gas tanks from the site, and employees sheltered in place. 12 NF3, as the gas is known, cleans and etches silicon wafers in chipmaking and is toxic to inhale. 38
Five days earlier, on October 14, the neck of a tank holding eight tons of it ruptured during a truck unloading at the same site. 123 Yakir Kosashvili, 35, died the day of the blast; Ilya Chechulin, 49, died the next day at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. 23 A third worker, in his 20s, is sedated and on a ventilator. 12
An upgrade built on execution
Fire services said Monday's release stayed inside the plant fence, with no casualties and no danger to residents. 24 By the time New York opened, JPMorgan analyst Harlan Sur had ended an Underweight rating, a sell-equivalent call in place since November 2022, and lifted Intel to Neutral, a hold, with an $85 target. 56 Shares, up 143% this year, were indicated roughly 4% higher pre-market. 567
None of the three upgrade write-ups ties the call to the plant; CoinCentral gives the blast a single clause. 567 Intel has not said whether Fab 28, the Kiryat Gat line that makes chips on the Intel 7 process, is running. 89
The numbers the note does carry
JPMorgan's $85 target sits below the close; the rest of the street is $109 to $145
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| JPMorgan (Sur) | $85 |
| Street consensus | $109.06 |
| Piper Sandler | $110 |
| TD Cowen | $115 |
| Tigress Financial | $145 |
Sur's case is execution under chief executive Lip-Bu Tan, and his own arithmetic shows the distance: external foundry revenue of $467 million in the first half of 2026, about $934 million annualized, against roughly $150 billion annualized at TSMC+3.22% — TSMC, up 3.22 percent today, the Taiwanese company that dominates contract chipmaking. 67
Server-chip share has slid from 77% to 53% since November 2022, with further losses expected over the next few quarters. 67 Kiryat Gat's planned expansion, backed by a $3.2 billion Israeli grant secured at the start of 2024, was paused within months. 8
Rare, contained, and unanswered until October 29
The other side: fire investigators call the tank failure highly unusual and still cannot say whether it was wear or something preventable, and Kiryat Gat police commander Shai Aleli said investigators had yet to determine whether crime or negligence was involved. 13 Monday's leak was caught by Intel's own monitors, and the company says it is working in full coordination with the authorities. 28
Deaths at chip plants are rare enough that Oregon's semiconductor industry appears to have recorded one: an Intel contractor crushed inside a manufacturing tool in 2017. 10
Intel reports third-quarter results on October 29, with consensus at $0.40 a share on $16.5 billion of revenue. 6 Listen for a number attached to Kiryat Gat, because the factory that has to make the turnaround real is the one still under investigation. 12
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
