Q1 revenue of $13.6 billion beat the $12.4 billion consensus by 9.4%. Data Centre and AI revenue rose 22% to $5.1 billion. Non-GAAP EPS of $0.29 beat the 1-cent consensus by a factor of 29. The stock is up more than 80% this year. Intel is working with Elon Musk on his planned Terafab chip facility.
Intel reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $13.6 billion on 23 April, beating consensus estimates of $12.42 billion by 9.4% and the midpoint of its own January guidance by $1.4 billion, the sixth consecutive quarter the company has exceeded its own financial forecasts.
Shares jumped approximately 20% in after-hours trading, adding to a year-to-date gain of more than 80%. CEO Lip-Bu Tan credited “unprecedented demand for silicon” driven by the shift of AI workloads toward CPU-heavy inference and agentic computing architectures.
The stock is up 84% in 2025 and more than 80% further in 2026 year-to-date, a remarkable recovery for a company that cut 15% of its workforce in July 2025 and cancelled chip fabrication projects in Germany and Poland.
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The headline numbers tell a consistent story. Q1 revenue grew 7% year-on-year. Non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.29 beat the consensus estimate of $0.01 by a factor of 29, the 1,350% EPS surprise figure cited by Investing.com reflects the same calculation.
Non-GAAP gross margin reached 41%, approximately 650 basis points ahead of guidance. GAAP EPS was negative $0.73, reflecting restructuring charges and other items that the company excludes from its adjusted figures; editors should note the distinction between the GAAP loss per share and the non-GAAP beat.
Non-GAAP net income reached $1.5 billion, more than double the prior-year figure of $646 million on the same basis.
The segment driving the turnaround is Data Centre and AI (DCAI). Revenue climbed 22% year-on-year to $5.1 billion, up from $4.1 billion a year earlier. Operating margin in DCAI expanded dramatically, from 13.9% to 30.5%, with operating income reaching $1.5 billion.
Intel highlighted sustained Xeon server CPU demand and said it expects “double-digit year-over-year growth” in DCAI to continue, supported by multiple long-term supply agreements with key customers.
Client Computing Group (PC chips) revenue reached $7.7 billion, above the $7.1 billion consensus. AI PC revenue grew 8% sequentially and now represents more than 60% of Intel’s client CPU mix.
The strategic thesis Tan is articulating is a direct challenge to the assumption that Nvidia GPUs are the only AI compute that matters. Intel’s argument is that as AI moves from pre-training, which is GPU-intensive and batch-processed in data centres, to inference and agentic workloads, which are latency-sensitive and distributed across edge devices, servers, and PCs, the CPU becomes indispensable.
“The CPU is reinserting itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era,” Tan said on the earnings call. The company frames this as a structural shift rather than a cyclical bump: as the ratio of inference to training workloads rises, so does the importance of the x86 architecture that dominates every data centre, PC, and edge server in the world.
Two new customer relationships announced alongside the results underscore the thesis. Intel entered a multiyear arrangement with Google that will see Xeon CPUs power AI, inference, and other workloads for Google Cloud, a significant win for a company whose data centre chip business had been losing share to AMD.
It also announced it will work with Elon Musk on the planned Terafab semiconductor research facility in Austin, Texas, which will produce chips for SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla.
Intel Foundry, the external chipmaking business, reported an operating loss of $2.4 billion in Q1. That is a significant figure but showed meaningful improvement from prior quarters.
Intel’s foundry strategy, competing with TSMC to manufacture chips for external customers on advanced process nodes, remains the most contested element of CEO Tan’s turnaround plan.
The 18A process node, now in production in Arizona, is the foundation of that strategy. A new collaboration with SambaNova on a next-generation heterogeneous AI inference architecture was also announced alongside the results.
For Q2 2026, Intel guided revenue of $13.8 billion to $14.8 billion, representing $1.4 billion in year-on-year growth at the midpoint of $14.3 billion, with non-GAAP EPS of $0.20 and gross margin of 39%.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
