For a company that spent much of the past two years in freefall, Thursday wasn’t exactly expected. Intel’s first quarter 2026 earnings landed well after the close on April 23 and by Friday morning the stock had surged roughly 24%, its largest single-day gain since 1987. The chip giant isn’t back the way it was in 2020, but it’s clearly no longer dying either.
The numbers are striking on their own terms. Revenue came in at $13.58 billion against analyst expectations of $12.41 billion, and EPS of $0.29 absolutely crushed the $0.02 forecast. It was Intel’s sixth consecutive quarter of beating guidance, and the AI business grew 40% year over year. CEO Lip-Bu Tan attributed the momentum directly to what he called “agentic AI” — the wave of AI applications that increasingly require inference compute running on conventional CPUs rather than just training on GPU clusters. “The next wave of AI will bring intelligence closer to the end user,” Tan said. “This shift is significantly increasing the need for Intel’s CPUs.”
The ripple effects reached across the sector. NVIDIA retook the $5 trillion market cap crown on the same Friday as chip stocks broadly rallied. Intel’s market cap crossed $414 billion, a level the company hasn’t seen in roughly 25 years. ARM and AMD were both up sharply for the week as well. Intel’s market cap hitting $300 billion had already been pegged to the Elon Musk/TeraFab tie-in earlier in the month; Thursday’s results piled on top of that.
Intel’s guidance for Q2 was also stronger than expected, and the company is preparing CEO Tan’s Computex keynote for June 2, where Nova Lake and 14A foundry partnership details are widely expected. Intel confirmed earlier this month a multi-year deal with Google to deploy Xeon CPUs alongside custom IPUs for next-gen cloud infrastructure, which adds a meaningful enterprise anchor to what was previously a mostly speculative recovery story.
For PC enthusiasts the question is whether a financially stronger Intel translates back into product momentum on the desktop. The Core Ultra 200S Plus platform we reviewed here showed Intel closing ground on AMD in gaming, which was not something anyone was saying two years ago. Nova Lake, the true next-generation platform on LGA 1954, is still the one to watch for a meaningful architectural leap. That story has a June appointment in Taipei (Ed: Mayhaps?).
A company that was writing off $18.8 billion in a single fiscal year eighteen months ago is now trading at a 25-year high. Whatever you think about Jensen Huang calling Jensen Huang a great company name, this week belonged to the other chip CEO (Ed: But not Kicking Pat?). Let us know what you make of Intel’s comeback in the forums.