By Robbie Whelan
The rise of artificial-intelligence agents and a host of new partnerships are helping breathe new life into chipmaker Intel, which just a year ago had been left for dead.
On Thursday, Intel reported sales of $13.6 billion for the March quarter, up 7% from the year-earlier period and beating estimates from analysts polled by FactSet by 11%.
Intel had largely sat out the AI revolution because it failed to develop a processor that could rival Nvidia's signature graphics processing units, or GPUs, and because its advanced chip fabrication business couldn't keep pace with rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.
But over the last year, as AI firms have deployed large language models and other tools that are operated by autonomous AI "agents," the humble CPU, a more basic kind of computer brain that Intel specializes in, has come back into vogue.
Also helping: a 10% stake that the Trump administration unveiled last summer, and an announcement that Intel will join Tesla and SpaceX's Terafab project, which includes a major chip-fabrication plant in Austin, Texas, as a strategic partner.
Intel raised guidance for sales in the current quarter to a range of $13.8 billion to $14.8 billion, higher than the $13 billion analysts had projected.
"The next wave of AI will bring intelligence closer to the end user, moving from foundational models to inference to agentic," said Lip-Bu Tan, Intel's chief executive, in a statement. "This shift is significantly increasing the need for Intel's CPUs and wafer and advanced packaging offerings."
The company reported a net loss of $3.7 billion, or 73 cents a share, however, compared with the profit of $2.5 million analysts had expected. The loss was the result of two one-time charges: one related to Intel's 78% stake in autonomous vehicle company Mobileye, which announced at $3.8 billion goodwill impairment Thursday morning, and the other from derivative payments related to the U.S. government's 10% stake in Intel.
Excluding these charges, Intel earned $1.5 billion in the March quarter, or 29 cents per share. Analysts had expected the company to break even on this financial measure.
Since the Trump administration announced the stake in August, Intel's shares have nearly tripled, rising to $66.78 at Thursday's market close.
One particularly bright spot in the earnings was the $5.1 billion in quarterly revenue produced by Intel's data-center segment, which relies largely on sales of CPUs to power the servers used to train and run AI models. The company had previously signaled high demand in the segment because of the high number of customers planning to replace older servers with new hardware. Analysts polled by FactSet had expected $4.5 billion in sales for the March quarter.
David Zinsner, Intel's chief financial officer, said in an interview that he expects demand for PC chips -- long the company's bread-and-butter product -- to be restrained for the rest of the year because widespread shortages of memory chips have driven up prices for laptops and other devices. But the company expects those slow sales to be offset by rising demand for data center chips to run AI agents.
One of the flashiest news announcements Intel has made in recent months is that it is joining Elon Musk's Terafab project, although the extent and exact nature of the chipmaker's involvement is still unclear. Intel has said it would offer its resources to help design, manufacture and package chips at the Terafab's foundries -- also known as "fabs" in the chips industry.
"Terafab is very important. Lip-Bu and Elon are still working out exactly what the business will entail," Zinsner said. "Elon looks at a process and figures out what doesn't work about it and then fixes it. Applying that to foundry is really exciting to us. We'll have him certainly help us figure out how to make the fabs more economical."
Write to Robbie Whelan at robbie.whelan@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 23, 2026 16:16 ET (20:16 GMT)
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