On August 11, 2025, Intel’s CEO Lip Vu Tan will step down after a meeting at the White House in Washington.
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Intel’s first-quarter results on Thursday beat Wall Street expectations by a wide margin, showing signs of a comeback for the struggling chipmaker.
Shares of the U.S. semiconductor maker rose 20% in after-hours trading.
Here’s how the company performed compared to the expectations of analysts surveyed by LSEG:
Earnings per share: 29 cents adjusted, 1 cent expected; Revenue: $13.58 billion, $12.42 billion expected.
Intel has recently become a darling of Wall Street, with its stock up more than 80% this year as of Thursday’s close after soaring 84% in 2025. The chipmaker has been championed by the Trump administration, which last year made the U.S. government its largest shareholder as part of an effort to bring chip manufacturing to the state. with Nvidia Softbank He also invested billions of dollars in Intel.
But the business, which lagged far behind rivals Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices in the early stages of the artificial intelligence boom, has not seen much traction.
That may finally be changing. Revenue increased 7.2% from $12.67 billion in the same period last year. This comes after sales declined year over year in five of the past seven quarters.
Intel said it expected second-quarter revenue of $13.8 billion to $14.8 billion and adjusted earnings per share of 20 cents. This is well above analysts’ expectations for sales of $13.07 billion and EPS of 9 cents.
Intel has seen the most growth in its data center business, and is starting to gain traction in the AI space as demand for central processing units (CPUs) soars. The segment’s sales increased 22% to $5.1 billion.
As agent workloads shift computing needs beyond Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), which have traditionally dominated AI, the once-silent CPU market has taken off. This increased demand for CPUs supported Intel’s recent $14 billion purchase of a 49% stake in an Irish chip factory it previously sold to Apollo Global Management.
“CPUs are once again re-establishing themselves as the essential foundation of the AI era,” Intel CEO Lip Vu Tan said during an earnings call. “This is not just wishful thinking, this is what we hear from our customers.”
Inter is still in the red. The company said its net loss widened to $4.28 billion, or 73 cents per share, from $887 million, or 19 cents per share, in the year-ago period.
Intel has a unique strategy when it comes to chips. As an integrated device manufacturer, Intel manufactures its products as well as the silicon that powers them. Most chipmakers outsource the complex and costly manufacturing process to large, corporate-run chip manufacturing factories. A semiconductor manufacturing company in Taiwan.
Intel’s foundry revenue rose 16% year over year to $5.4 billion, but much of its foundry business consists of manufacturing its own chips.
Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 processors began selling for PCs in January, and the latest Xeon 6+ data center processors hit the market in March. Shortly after, Google committed to using multiple generations of Intel CPUs to run AI workloads in its data centers.
Intel’s latest PC and data center processors are manufactured on an 18A process node in a huge new factory in Arizona. For now, Intel remains the only major customer for the company’s 18A chip fab, despite its technological similarities to TSMC’s 2-nanometer node.
The challenge will be convincing TSMC’s longtime customers to make the leap.
Intel is recovering from years of delays with previous nodes, where some 18A wafers were defective, reducing the number of usable chips per wafer (commonly referred to as yield).
Some analysts are expecting promising production volumes for Intel’s next-generation 14A technology, planned for 2028 and beyond. Tan said at X in January that Intel was “very committed to 14A,” after previously suggesting that Intel would wait for large customers to emerge before rolling out the latest technology.
Tan said on the earnings call that “multiple customers” are “actively evaluating this technology” and development is progressing at a faster pace than Intel has seen with its 18A technology.
Elon Musk may be a major customer, but details remain unclear. Intel announced earlier this month that it would join Musk’s Terafab chip complex in Austin, Texas, to help “design, manufacture, and package ultra-high performance chips at scale” for SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla.
During Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Musk said Tesla plans to use Intel’s upcoming 14A process to produce chips at the facility. The facility is intended to make chips for use in Tesla vehicles and robots, as well as SpaceX’s unbuilt orbital data center.
Musk said that while 14A is still being developed by Intel, “by the time Terafab scales up, 14A will probably be pretty mature or ready for prime time.”
“Elon and I share a strong belief that global semiconductor supply is not keeping up with the rapidly accelerating demand,” Tan said on a conference call with Intel, adding that “together we are exploring unconventional ways to improve manufacturing efficiency.”
Intel’s renewed focus on manufacturing chips for other companies began in 2021 when Pat Gelsinger became CEO. Gelsinger was ousted in 2024 and replaced by Tan early last year.
Intel cut 15% of its workforce in July and canceled chip manufacturing projects in Germany and Poland. In Ohio, Intel’s huge new chip factory was originally scheduled to begin production this year, but has been delayed until 2030. “Over the past few years, the company has invested too much too quickly and without sufficient demand,” Tan wrote in a memo at the time of the job cuts.
The latest guidance could also be strengthened by another part of the chip manufacturing process where Intel excels: advanced packaging. This involves connecting individual chip dies into a larger system. Intel is one of only three companies worldwide to offer the most advanced type of packaging, creating a new bottleneck in the race to make enough chips for AI.
CFO David Zinsner told CNBC that he believes advanced packaging will generate billions of dollars in revenue per customer, although he previously estimated the number to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Intel’s advanced packaging customers include Amazon, Cisco, and new initiatives from SpaceX and Tesla.
—CNBC’s Kristina Partinevelos contributed to this report.
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