Intel Xeon 6+ data center CPU wafer shown at Intel Technology Tour in September 2025. Intel Xeon 6+ is expected to be introduced in the first half of 2026.
Source: Intel
Intel reported first-quarter earnings Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations, as the struggling manufacturer showed signs of revival.
Shares of the US chip maker jumped 15% in after-hours trading.
Here’s how the company fared, compared to ratings from analysts polled by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: 29 cents adjusted vs. 1 cent expected
- Net worth: $13.58 billion vs. $12.42 billion expected
Intel has been the darling of Wall Street lately, with its stock up more than 80% this year as of Thursday’s close, after rising 84% by 2025. The chip maker has been boosted by the Trump administration, which made the US government a major shareholder last year as part of an effort to bring the chip stateside. Nvidia again SoftBank it also invested billions in Intel.
But the business, which fell behind rivals Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices at the start of the artificial intelligence boom, has never seen much momentum.
That may change eventually. Revenue increased 7.2% from $12.67 billion a year ago. That follows full-year revenue declines in five of the past seven quarters.
Intel said it expects second-quarter profit of between $13.8 billion and $14.8 billion, and earnings per share of 20 cents. That’s above analyst expectations for net profit of $13.07 billion and EPS of 9 cents.
Intel has seen the strongest growth in its data center business, where it is beginning to gain power from AI due to the growing demand for central processing units (CPUs). Revenue in that segment increased 22% to $5.1 billion.
The once-dormant CPU market has begun to work as agent computing needs exceed Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) that have dominated AI until now. That growing CPU demand underpinned Intel’s recent $14 billion purchase of the 49% stake in its Irish chip fabric that it had previously sold to Apollo Global Management.
Intel is still losing money. The company said its net loss widened to $4.28 billion, or 73 cents per share, from $887 million, or 19 cents a year earlier.
Intel has an unusual strategy when it comes to chips. As an integrated device manufacturer, Intel makes its own products while also producing the silicon that powers them. Most chip makers outsource the complex and expensive manufacturing process to large semiconductor chip manufacturing plants. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Foundry revenue at Intel rose 16% year over year to $5.4 billion, although most of its core business involves making its own chips.
Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 processor went on sale in PCs in January, while its new Xeon 6+ data center processors hit the market in March. Soon after, Google committed to using multiple generations of Intel CPUs to run AI work in its data centers.
Intel’s latest PC and data center processors are manufactured at the 18A process facility in a new large facility in Arizona. At the moment, Intel is still the only major customer of 18A chip fabs, despite having similar technology to TSMC’s 2-nanometer node.
The challenge will be convincing TSMC’s longtime customers to make the move.
Intel is recovering from years of delays in previous nodes, and some of the 18A wafers have had defects, resulting in a lower number of usable chips per wafer, often referred to as yield.
-CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos contributed to this report.
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