Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel Corp., departs following a gathering on the White Home in Washington, Aug. 11, 2025.
Alex Wroblewski | Bloomberg | Getty Pictures
Intel reported first-quarter earnings Thursday that blew previous Wall Road’s expectations, because the struggling chipmaker reveals indicators of a revival.
Shares of the U.S. chipmaker jumped 20% in after-hours buying and selling.
This is how the corporate did, in contrast with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: 29 cents adjusted vs. 1 cent anticipated
- Income: $13.58 billion vs. $12.42 billion anticipated
Intel has been a Wall Road darling of late, with its replenish greater than 80% this 12 months as of Thursday’s shut, after hovering 84% in 2025. The chipmaker has been championed by the Trump administration, which turned the U.S. authorities into the most important shareholder final 12 months as a part of an effort to convey chip manufacturing stateside. Nvidia and SoftBank additionally invested billions in Intel.
However the enterprise, which fell method behind rivals Nvidia and Superior Micro Gadgets in the course of the early levels of the synthetic intelligence growth, hasn’t been seeing a lot momentum.
That might lastly be altering. Income elevated 7.2% from $12.67 billion a 12 months earlier. That follows year-over-year income declines in 5 of the previous seven quarter.
Intel mentioned it expects second-quarter income between $13.8 billion and $14.8 billion, and adjusted earnings per share of 20 cents. That is nicely above analyst expectations for income of $13.07 billion and EPS of 9 cents.
Intel noticed the strongest development in its knowledge heart enterprise, the place it is beginning to get traction in AI due to surging demand for central processing items (CPUs). Income in that division climbed 22% to $5.1 billion.
The once-sleepy CPU market has taken off as agentic workloads shift compute wants past Nvidia’s graphics processing items (GPUs) which have dominated AI to date. That rising CPU demand underpinned Intel’s current $14 billion buy of a 49% stake in its Eire chip fab that it had beforehand bought to Apollo World Administration.
“The CPU is reinserting itself because the indispensable basis of the AI period,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan mentioned on the corporate’s incomes name. “This is not simply our wishful considering, it is what we hear from our clients.”
Intel remains to be dropping cash. The corporate mentioned its web loss widened to $4.28 billion, or 73 cents per share, from $887 million, or 19 cents a share a 12 months earlier.
Intel has an uncommon technique in terms of chips. As an built-in machine producer, Intel makes its personal merchandise whereas additionally manufacturing the silicon that powers them. Most chipmakers outsource the advanced and dear manufacturing course of to large chip fabrication vegetation run by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Firm.
Foundry income at Intel rose 16% from a 12 months go to $5.4 billion, although a lot of its foundry enterprise consists of constructing its personal chips.
Intel’s Core Extremely Collection 3 processor began promoting in PCs in January, whereas its latest Xeon 6+ knowledge heart processors hit the market in March. Quickly after, Google dedicated to utilizing a number of generations of the Intel CPU to run AI workloads in its knowledge facilities.
Intel’s newest PC and knowledge heart processors are made on 18A course of node at an enormous new fab in Arizona. For now, Intel stays the one main buyer of its 18A chip fabs, regardless of it being technologically much like TSMC’s 2-nanometer node.
The problem can be convincing longtime TSMC clients to make the leap.
Intel is recovering from years of delays on earlier nodes, and a few 18A wafers have had defects, making for a decrease variety of usable chips per wafer, usually known as yield.
Some analysts are ready to see promising yields of Intel’s next-generation 14A know-how, deliberate for 2028 or past. After beforehand indicating Intel would await a significant buyer to emerge earlier than shifting ahead with the expense of ramping to the latest know-how, Tan mentioned on X in January that Intel is “going huge time into 14A.”
Tan mentioned on the earnings name that “a number of clients” are “actively evaluating the know-how,” and that its improvement is going on at a quicker tempo than Intel noticed with its the 18A know-how.
A significant buyer may very well be Elon Musk, although particulars stay murky. Intel introduced earlier this month that it will likely be becoming a member of Musk’s Terafab chip advanced in Austin, Texas, to assist “design, fabricate, and package deal ultra-high-performance chips at scale” for SpaceX, xAI and Tesla.
Throughout Tesla’s first-quarter earnings name on Wednesday, Musk mentioned Tesla plans to make use of Intel’s forthcoming 14A course of to supply chips on the facility, which is imply to make chips to be used in Tesla’s autos and robots, and in yet-to-be-constructed orbital datacenters for SpaceX.
Musk mentioned 14A remains to be in improvement by Intel however, “by the point Terafab scales up, 14A will most likely be pretty mature or prepared for prime time.”
On Intel’s name, Tan mentioned, “Elon and I share a powerful conviction that world semiconductor provide will not be maintaining tempo with the fast acceleration in demand,” including that collectively they’re “in search of unconventional methods to enhance manufacturing effectivity.”
Intel’s renewed deal with manufacturing chips for others got here when Pat Gelsinger took the helm as CEO in 2021. Gelsinger was pushed out in 2024 and changed by Tan early final 12 months.
Intel slashed 15% of its workforce in July and canceled chip fab initiatives in Germany and Poland. In Ohio, Intel’s big new chip fab is delayed till 2030, after preliminary plans had it beginning manufacturing this 12 months. Tan wrote in a memo on the time of layoffs that, “Over the previous a number of years, the corporate invested an excessive amount of, too quickly – with out ample demand.”
The most recent steering might also be sturdy on account of one other a part of the chipmaking course of the place Intel excels: superior packaging. That includes particular person chip dies being linked to a bigger system. Intel is one in all solely three world corporations that provide probably the most superior sort of packaging, creating a brand new bottleneck within the race to make sufficient chips for AI.
CFO David Zinsner informed CNBC that he is assured superior packaging will herald billions of {dollars} per buyer, after beforehand estimating that determine could be within the a whole lot of hundreds of thousands. Intel’s superior packaging clients embody Amazon, Cisco, and the brand new dedication from SpaceX and Tesla.
—CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos contributed to this report.
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