Intel stock jumps 19% as Q1 revenue tops $13.6 billion on AI-driven CPU demand

Intel beat every line of analyst consensus in its latest quarterly report — revenue, earnings per share, data-center revenue, forward guidance — and the stock jumped 19% in after-hours trading, its largest overnight move in years. Revenue came in at $13.58 billion against the $12.42 billion Wall Street expected, and adjusted earnings landed at 29 cents per share versus a consensus of just 1 cent, a 28-cent beat that is rare at any scale and extraordinary for a company most of the market had relegated to the AI sidelines. The result reframes the hardware narrative: after eighteen months in which Nvidia’s graphics processing units defined the conversation, the central processing unit is showing it has a central role in the agentic AI workloads everyone is now building.

What changed is what powers the next wave. GPUs dominated the era of training the large models; running those models in production — especially the “agentic” systems that chain dozens of inference steps together — demands a different workload mix, and CPUs are reclaiming share. Intel’s data-center revenue climbed to $5.1 billion, a 22% jump year over year, and chief executive Lip-Bu Tan told investors on the earnings call that server CPU demand is running ahead of supply with no sign of slowing. For enterprise customers and cloud users, the consequence is competitive: a second credible AI-infrastructure supplier would shift hyperscaler capex patterns and cloud pricing.

The numbers carry weight because they mark a reversal. Intel slashed 15% of its workforce, canceled chip-fab projects in Germany and Poland, and pushed its massive Ohio facility back to 2030 after a string of guidance misses. The company has now delivered six consecutive quarters of beating its own guidance. AI-related businesses generated 60% of total revenue and grew 40% year over year, according to chief financial officer David Zinsner. The forward guidance that came with the report — next-quarter revenue between $13.8 billion and $14.8 billion, midpoint gross margin of 39% — implies the momentum runs into summer.

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The turnaround is real but incomplete. Intel still reported a GAAP net loss of $4.28 billion, or 73 cents per share — wider than the $887 million loss a year earlier — reflecting the cost of a capital-expenditure cycle that continues to drag on reported earnings. The just-closed $14.2 billion repurchase of Apollo’s 49% stake in the Fab 34 plant in Ireland — $7.7 billion in cash and $6.5 billion in new debt — adds leverage at a moment when free cash flow ran to negative $2 billion for the quarter. And the most interesting technology bet, the next-generation 14A manufacturing node, still needs a committed major customer. Tan said “multiple” customers are evaluating 14A, but none have been publicly named beyond a disclosed plan to fabricate Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chips through Elon Musk’s Terafab complex in Austin.

For competitors, the read-through is uneven. TSMC’s advanced packaging backlog is already full, and Intel is one of just three companies globally with the most advanced packaging capability — a capacity constraint becoming a bottleneck for the entire AI hardware build. For workers, the 2025 layoffs are largely behind the company, and the current ramp is driving hiring in Arizona and Oregon. For governments, the beat vindicates, for the moment, the CHIPS Act subsidies and the Trump administration’s direct equity stake in Intel from last year — though critics in both parties will want to see sustained profitability before declaring the industrial-policy experiment a success.

Intel’s next earnings report is scheduled for July 24. The 14A node remains on track for 2028 production, the Tesla–Intel collaboration at the Austin Terafab is expected to begin fabrication in 2027, and the Ohio facility remains targeted for 2030.

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