Intel is showing real signs of life. The American chipmaker reported first-quarter 2026 earnings Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations on both revenue and profit, sending its stock up 15% in after-hours trading and adding to what has already been a remarkable run for the company.
Revenue came in at $13.58 billion, well above the $12.42 billion analysts had projected. Adjusted earnings per share landed at 29 cents, compared to the 1 cent Wall Street had forecast. The results mark a meaningful shift for a company that had posted year over year revenue declines in five of its previous seven quarters.
Intel’s stock has already climbed more than 80% in 2026 as of Thursday’s market close, following an 84% surge in 2025. Much of that momentum has been tied to renewed confidence in the company’s direction, including a major investment from the Trump administration, which made the U.S. government the chipmaker’s largest shareholder last year as part of a broader push to build domestic chip manufacturing capacity. Nvidia and SoftBank have also poured billions into the company.
Data center growth drives the results
The standout performer this quarter was Intel’s data center division, where revenue climbed 22% to $5.1 billion. The growth reflects rising demand for central processing units, or CPUs, as artificial intelligence workloads expand beyond the graphics processing units, or GPUs, that Nvidia has long dominated.
This shift toward so called agentic AI, where software systems carry out complex, multi step tasks with minimal human input is driving up demand for the kind of processing power that CPUs provide. Intel has positioned itself to capitalize on that trend. Google recently committed to using multiple generations of Intel’s CPU technology to power AI workloads in its data centers, a significant vote of confidence from one of the world’s largest tech companies.
Intel’s newest products are also gaining traction. Its Core Ultra Series 3 processor began appearing in personal computers in January, while its Xeon 6+ data center chips reached the market in March. Both are built on Intel’s advanced 18A process node at a new fabrication facility in Arizona.
Challenges remain for the chipmaker
Despite the encouraging results, Intel is not yet in the clear. The company reported a net loss of $4.28 billion, or 73 cents per share, in the quarter a significant widening from the $887 million loss it reported in the same period a year earlier. That gap reflects the enormous cost of rebuilding Intel’s manufacturing infrastructure after years of costly delays on previous chip production nodes.
Intel operates differently from most of its competitors. Rather than outsourcing production to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, as Nvidia and others do, Intel designs and manufactures its own chips. It also runs a separate foundry business that makes chips for outside customers, which brought in $5.4 billion in revenue this quarter up 16% from a year ago, though the bulk of that still comes from producing its own products.
The 18A process node, Intel’s most advanced, is technically comparable to TSMC’s 2 nanometer production process. But some 18A wafers have experienced defects, reducing the number of usable chips produced per batch a metric the industry calls yield. Convincing longtime TSMC customers to switch will require Intel to prove that its manufacturing is both reliable and competitive at scale.
Intel’s outlook tops expectations
For the second quarter of 2026, Intel projected revenue between $13.8 billion and $14.8 billion, with adjusted earnings per share of 20 cents. Both figures came in well above analyst forecasts of $13.07 billion in revenue and 9 cents per share in earnings. That forward guidance suggests the company’s leadership believes the momentum is more than a one quarter blip.
Whether Intel can sustain that trajectory and win over new foundry customers will define the next chapter of one of Silicon Valley’s most storied comebacks.
