Intel Corporation announced its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026 on April 24, reporting revenue and earnings that exceeded previous guidance. The company posted quarterly revenue of 15.2 billion dollars, representing a 12 percent increase year-over-year. GAAP earnings per share stood at 0.38 dollars, while non-GAAP earnings per share reached 0.46 dollars, surpassing the consensus estimate of 0.41 dollars. Intel attributed the performance to a significant uptick in demand within its Data Center and AI division and a stabilizing personal computer market.
The Data Center and AI group reported revenue of 4.8 billion dollars, a 15 percent increase compared to the same period last year. Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger stated during the earnings call that the growth was primarily fueled by the deployment of Xeon 6 processors and the continued ramp-up of Gaudi 3 AI accelerators. Gelsinger highlighted a shift in the enterprise landscape toward agentic AI, where autonomous software agents require high-performance central processing units for logic and orchestration alongside traditional graphics processing unit-based training. He noted that Intels architecture is positioned to handle these complex, multi-step reasoning tasks at scale.
Intels Client Computing Group saw revenue rise to 8.1 billion dollars, up 9 percent year-over-year. This growth was supported by the broad adoption of Core Ultra processors, which integrate dedicated neural processing units for local AI tasks. Meanwhile, Intel Foundry reported revenue of 4.2 billion dollars as the company continues its five nodes in four years strategy. Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner confirmed that the Intel 18A process remains on track for production readiness by the end of 2026, with several new external customers signing design wins during the first quarter.
Looking ahead to the second quarter of 2026, Intel provided a revenue forecast of 14.8 billion dollars to 15.8 billion dollars, which is above the 15.1 billion dollar average analyst projection. The company expects non-GAAP gross margins to improve to 45.5 percent, driven by better factory utilization and a shift toward higher-margin server products. Zinsner noted that the company is maintaining its disciplined capital expenditure plan while prioritizing investments in domestic manufacturing facilities in Ohio and Arizona.
The report also detailed progress in Intels software ecosystem. The company announced that its OpenVINO toolkit has seen a 40 percent increase in developer downloads, facilitating the deployment of AI models across Intel hardware. Gelsinger concluded that the integration of AI capabilities across the entire product portfolio, from edge devices to the data center, is creating a sustainable growth trajectory. The company did not announce any changes to its dividend policy or share repurchase program during the call.