Intel's stock jumped more than 11% after its second-quarter results beat Wall Street on almost every line, according to the Kobeissi Letter, as the company's AI data center business drove its strongest quarterly revenue growth in more than fifteen years. Revenue came in at $16.13 billion, up 25% year over year and about 12% above the $14.42 billion analysts had expected, with the Data Center and AI segment alone growing 59% to $6.3 billion. On an adjusted basis, Intel swung to a $2.2 billion profit from a $400 million loss a year earlier, and adjusted earnings per share of $0.42 nearly doubled the $0.22 Wall Street had modeled. CEO Lip-Bu Tan called it the company's strongest quarterly revenue growth in over fifteen years. The headline numbers hide a messier picture under standard accounting rules: Intel still posted an $11 billion GAAP net loss, driven by $12.6 billion in one-time non-operating charges rather than the underlying business. Intel guided third-quarter revenue to $15.8 billion to $16.8 billion and an adjusted gross margin of 42%, both broadly in line with the current run rate. The result adds a legacy chipmaker to the list of companies, alongside AMD and Nvidia's supply chain, showing that AI infrastructure spending keeps outrunning expectations even as the rest of the economy slows.
Why it matters · A legacy chipmaker most investors had written off in the AI race just posted its best quarterly growth in 15 years on AI data center demand alone, a signal that the AI capex boom is broad enough to lift laggards, not just Nvidia and AMD, and it raises the bar for what counts as an in-line quarter for the rest of the sector heading into earnings season.
Worth asking · Intel has spent years being treated as the chipmaker AI investors could skip, but its Data Center and AI segment just grew 59% in a single quarter. Is Intel back as a genuine third option in AI compute, or is this one strong quarter riding an industry-wide wave that would have lifted almost anyone?