| | | Intel Shows Progress in First Earnings Report Since U.S. Investment -- 2nd Update
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By Robbie Whelan
Intel's turnaround effort gathered momentum as it reported sales growth in its core product line of PC processors and shrinking costs across the company, the result of layoffs and other cuts that have accelerated this year.
The beleaguered chipmaker, which has fallen badly behind rivals like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices in the race to develop powerful AI chips, reported on Thursday net income of $4.1 billion for the third quarter compared with a year-earlier loss of $16.6 billion.
Intel is burning through its inventory of PC chips faster than it had expected, as businesses rush to refresh office computers with the latest version of the Windows operating system, Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner said in an interview.
"Now we're dealing with supply," Zinsner said. "Demand is much stronger than we anticipated when we planned our supply for the year."
The result breaks Intel's longest losing streak in 35 years; the company had reported six straight quarterly losses before Thursday.
Shares rose more than 7% in after-hours trading.
The company's shares have risen more than 85% so far this year, with nearly all the gains coming since August, when the U.S. government announced that it would convert around $9 billion in federal grants into a 10% equity stake in the company.
Intel's shares soared again in September, after chip giant Nvidia -- the world's largest public company with a market value of more than $4.4 trillion -- said it would invest $5 billion in Intel and for the first time buy Intel's X86 CPUs, the computer brains it makes for use in data center servers.
Both deals bolstered confidence in Intel's future after a yearslong slump: the federal partnership because it suggested that Intel is now trading on the government's credit and that the administration wouldn't allow the company to fail; the Nvidia deal because it gives Intel a bigger foothold in the roaring data center market. Tech investment firm SoftBank also invested $2 billion in Intel this year.
Huge challenges remain, however. Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan, who took the helm in March after four chaotic months in which the company didn't have a permanent CEO, has said his priority is revamping Intel's product lines, cutting costs and attracting more customers for the company's contract chip-manufacturing business, or foundry. Revenue in the foundry business was down 2% in the third quarter from a year earlier, at $4.2 billion.
Intel also faces stiff competition in both the PC and data center spaces, especially from AMD, which has rolled out rival products at a steady clip. Sales of Intel's data center chips were $4.1 billion for the quarter, down 1% from the year-earlier period.
Zinsner, Intel's CFO, said he expects sales of data center chips to strengthen in the coming quarters as so-called "hyperscalers" upgrade older server installations with new CPUs and as they focus more on inference functions, or the computations that allow AI models to respond to user queries.
Intel specializes in CPUs and has struggled to design GPUs -- graphics processing units, which power AI training and have fueled Nvidia's explosive growth in recent years -- that appeal to software developers.
As more models get trained up, however, AI companies are expected to shift their investments to the chips needed for inference and buy more CPUs, which tend to cost less than GPUs and draw much less power.
Using GPUs to power inference for smaller AI models, such as the thousands of enterprise AI tools used by businesses, "is like taking your Ferrari out to get the groceries," Zinsner said. The shift will benefit Intel's data center chips business, he said.
Once the dominant player by far in PC chips, Intel lagged far behind rivals in the AI boom and struggled to produce a return on large investments in its foundry business. A planned, $28 billion chip-manufacturing plant in Ohio has been delayed repeatedly, and last quarter Tan said its completion would be pushed back to after 2030 as the company re-evaluates its capital investments.
Intel's foundry business stemmed some bleeding this past quarter, slashing losses by more than half. The contract manufacturing business saw sales fall 2% to $4.2 billion, but the foundry's net loss was $2.3 billion, compared with $5.8 billion a year ago.
Tan continued with his aggressive cost-cutting program in the third quarter as well, reducing the number of Intel employees by 13%, from 101,400 in the second quarter to 88,400. Total company headcount, including subsidiaries, is down 29% from a year ago.
Intel forecast $12.8 billion to $13.8 billion in sales for the fourth quarter, roughly in line with the consensus estimate of $13.4 billion from analysts polled by Factset.
Write to Robbie Whelan at robbie.whelan@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 23, 2025 17:41 ET (21:41 GMT)
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