Intel shares rallied 16% on Tuesday following a Wall Street Journal report that both Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing are potentially weighing bids that could result in splitting the embattled chipmaker.

The stock was on pace for its best day since March 2020.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Broadcom may consider a play for the company’s chip design and marketing segment, citing people familiar with the matter, while TSMC is interested in a stake or complete control of Intel’s factories. The companies have not filed bids and talks are largely informal, the Journal reported.

The iconic American chipmaker’s stock has continued to sink lower in recent years, shedding billions in market value. Intel fell behind on the artificial intelligence tailwinds that have swept up the broader semiconductor sector.

A law firm that represents Tesla and Elon Musk has written proposed legislation that would alter Delaware corporate law, according to a person directly familiar with the drafting of the bill.

The proposed legislation, drafted by Richards, Layton & Finger, or RLF, would amend Delaware General Corporation Law, and if adopted, could pave the way for the reinstatement of Musk’s 2018 CEO pay package at Tesla, worth tens of billions in options.

RLF confirmed their involvement to CNBC.

“Statutory changes are necessary to restore the core principles that have been the hallmark of Delaware for over a century and ensure that Delaware remains the preeminent jurisdiction for incorporation,” Lisa Schmidt, president of RLF, said in a statement.

The bill was introduced to the Delaware General Assembly on Monday and would require approval by the state’s two chambers as well as Gov. Matt Meyer before becoming a law.

The pay package Tesla granted to Musk in 2018 was the largest CEO compensation plan in public corporate history, but the it was ordered to be rescinded last year by the Delaware Court of Chancery.

In her ruling, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick wrote that the pay plan was inappropriately set by Tesla’s board, which was controlled by Musk, and that it was approved by shareholders who were misled by Tesla’s proxy materials before they were asked to vote on it.

Under the proposed legislation, Musk might no longer be considered a “controller” of Tesla, said Brian JM Quinn, Boston College Law professor. Transactions that involve self-dealing with controllers or directors would be subject to less review than they are now, Quinn said. Those transactions range from going-private deals, to mergers and acquisitions, and board and executive compensation decisions.

“The real role of corporate law is to protect minority investors,” Quinn said. “With this bill, the legislature is saying ‘Now you know what? Protect them less.'”

The proposed legislation would also limit the documents that minority stakeholders are able to obtain through “books and records” inspection requests, Quinn said. Those stakeholders would be limited to formal items like a certificate of incorporation or minutes of stockholder meetings but they’d lose access to informal communications like emails or other messages between board members and executives, Quinn said. 

After the Court of Chancery’s ruling last year, Musk started a campaign against companies incorporating in Delaware and moved the site of incorporation for his businesses out of the state. He has aimed his ire at Chancellor McCormick with repeated and disparaging posts about her on X, his social network.

Other prominent executives, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Bill Ackman of Pershing Square, have also voiced criticism of the Delaware judiciary. 

“Delaware has taken some heat for supposedly being too hard on controller transactions,” said Renee Zaytsev, partner at Boies Schiller and co-chair of the firm’s securities and shareholder dispute practice. 

“These amendments seem to be a course correction that would make it significantly easier for boards and controllers to avoid judicial scrutiny of their transactions,” she said.

Tesla and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

WATCH: Tesla stock hinges on new vehicles being introduced, says Canaccord’s George Gianarikas

Elon Musk’s xAI on Tuesday unveiled its latest artificial intelligence model, Grok 3, claiming it can outperform offerings from OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek based on early testing, which included standardized tests on math, science and coding. 

“We’re very excited to present Grok 3, which is, we think, an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2 in a very short period of time,” Musk said at a demonstration of Grok 3 that was streamed on his social media platform X. 

The team also said it was launching a new product called “Deep Search,” which would act as a “next generation search engine.” 

Grok 3 will be rolled out for premium X subscribers later in the day, and will also be accessible through a separate subscription for the model’s web and app versions, the xAI team said.

Speaking at The World Governments Summit in Dubai last week Musk had dubbed the model “scary smart,” with powerful reasoning capabilities, claiming it outperformed all other existing models in xAI’s internal tests. 

“This might be the last time that an AI is better than Grok,” Musk said at the time, adding that it was trained on “a lot of synthetic data,” and was capable of reflecting upon its mistakes to achieve logical consistency. 

The xAI team claimed that an early iteration of Grok 3 had been given better ratings than existing competitors on Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced website that pits different AI models against each other in blind tests.

Toward the end of the product demo, Musk said that the company will keep improving the model.

“We should emphasize that this is kind of a beta, meaning that you should expect some imperfections at first, but we will improve it rapidly, almost every day,” he said, adding that the voice assistance for the model would be released at a later time.

Musk, who has been quite vocal about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, started xAI in 2023 entering the generative AI market that includes OpenAI’s ChatGPT. 

In September last year, OpenAI launched its most advanced model, the o1, which came with reasoning abilities and was able to solve relatively complex science, coding and math tasks. 

Musk, along with Sam Altman, helped create OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015.

However, in recent years Musk and OpenAI’s leadership have been feuding. Musk recently led an investor group that submitted a proposal to buy the AI startup’s nonprofit parent for $97.4 billion — an offer OpenAI declined. 

Last month, Chinese start-up DeepSeek shocked the AI market when it released a technical paper that claimed one of its open source models was able to rival the performance of OpenAI’s o1 model despite using a cheaper, less energy-intensive process.

It accomplished the feat in the face of the U.S. restricting leading AI chipmaker Nvidia from selling its cutting-edge GPUs — used for training AI models — to China. 

XAI has a “Colossus supercomputer,” for training AI, which it said last year was utilizing a cluster of 100,000 advanced Nvidia GPUs for AI training. On Tuesday, the company revealed that it doubled the size of its GPU cluster for the training of Grok 3.

While many AI and tech experts have told CNBC that DeepSeek has intensified AI competition, showing what can be done with less advanced technology, others are more skeptical about its impact.