The Intel logo is displayed on a sign in front of Intel headquarters on Jan. 22, 2026 in Santa Clara, California.
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Intel reported fourth-quarter earnings Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations but offered soft guidance for the current quarter.
Shares of the company were down as much as 7% in after-hours trading.
Here’s how the chipmaker did compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:
Earnings per share: 15 cents adjusted vs. 8 cents expectedRevenue: $13.7 billion vs. $13.4 billion expected
Intel said it expected first-quarter revenue between $11.7 billion and $12.7 billion, and breakeven adjusted earnings per share. That came in below LSEG expectations of 5 cents earnings per share on $12.51 billion in sales.
The company said it had a net loss of $600 million, or 12 cents per diluted share. In the year-ago period, Intel reported a net loss of $100 million, or 3 cents per share.
Investor expectations were high for Intel heading into the report, with the stock up 147% in the past year. The rally has been driven by optimism that Intel may be on the cusp of securing its first major anchor customer for its foundry business, which manufactures chips for other companies.
CEO Lip-Bu Tan said earlier this month that the company’s 18A manufacturing technology — competing with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s 2nm technology — “over-delivered” in 2025. That suggests that the technology is mature enough to start volume production of products, such as Intel’s own Core Ultra Series 3 central processor.
In a statement, Tan said that Intel was “working aggressively” to increase 18A supply to meet “strong customer demand.”
Finance chief David Zinsner told CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos that customers for Intel’s next-generation 14A technology would show up in the second half of the year. Zinsner added that the company was unlikely to announce customers in general.
“Once we get them, we’re gonna need to start really spending capital on the 14A front, and that’s how you’ll know,” Zinsner said.
He added that the company’s soft guidance in the first quarter was partially because the company doesn’t have the supply it needs for seasonal demand.
Intel said its foundry had $4.5 billion in revenue, although some of that is accounting for making the company’s own chips.
There is also optimism tied to strong sales of Intel’s latest server chips, which analysts say are seeing a sales boom because of increased spending on infrastructure for artificial intelligence. Tan said in a statement Thursday that Intel’s central processing units were becoming more important because of systems built for artificial intelligence.
Revenue from those chips is reported as Data Center and AI sales, which totaled $4.7 billion in revenue during the quarter, up 9% on an annual basis.
Chips for laptops are reported as Client Computing Group sales. The product category was down 7% on a year-over-year basis to $8.2 billion in sales.
During 2025, the U.S. government, SoftBank and Nvidia made big investments into the chipmaker, all becoming major shareholders. Intel said that its sale of stock to Nvidia worth $5 billion was completed during the quarter.
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