Intel Rips

Josh Kushner announces Thrive Eternal, Google to invest up to $40B in Anthropic, soldier who made $400,000 betting on Maduro raid arrested

Brandon Gorrell

Apr 24, 2026

Happy Friday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is Intel stock ripping after it beat earnings yesterday.

Today’s lineup

CrowdStrike President & CEO George Kurtz at 11:30 AM
Word Combo Guru Professor Sendy at 11:45 AM
VaynerMedia Chairman & CEO Gary Vaynerchuk at 12:00 PM
Humble Founder & CEO Eyal Cohen at 12:30 PM
Comfy Co-Founder & CEO Yoland Yan at 12:45 PM
Sinceerly Creator Ben Horwitz at 1:00 PM

Intel Rips

by John Coogan

Intel jumped 20% after hours on the back of $13.6B in Q1 revenue. 11% above analyst estimates and up 7% YoY. Next quarter is guiding to even better, somewhere north of $14B probably. There are still big losses under the hood, $3.7B net loss to be precise, mostly driven by one-time charges related to Mobileye and derivative payments tied to the U.S. government’s 10% stake. But strip those out and Intel earned $1.5B, much better than expectations of break-even performance.

The narrative has completely shifted. “Intel is working again.” The AI trade has mostly been Nvidia, Nvidia’s memory suppliers, TSMC, power equipment, cloud capex, and a few software names that can prove real adoption. Intel was the embarrassing missing piece: the company that invented the modern CPU era, missed mobile, fell behind TSMC, failed to produce a competitive AI GPU, and then spent the last few years trying to convince the world that it could still matter. Now, oddly enough, the rise of AI agents is giving Intel a second shot.

The reason is simple: AI agents need CPUs to do things. Training frontier models is still a GPU story, but running agentic workflows across data centers — orchestrating tasks, routing jobs, managing memory, handling inference workloads, coordinating servers — increases demand for the boring central processor. Intel’s data-center segment produced $5.1B in quarterly revenue, beating the $4.5B analysts expected. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the next wave of AI is moving from foundational models to inference to “agentic AI,” and that this shift increases the need for Intel CPUs, wafers, and advanced packaging. On the earnings call, he said the CPU-to-GPU ratio today is closer to one CPU for every four GPUs, versus one for every eight in prior years.

Then you have Terafab, very exciting, but clearly further off. Elon Musk wants to build a massive vertically integrated chip-manufacturing operation, with Tesla, SpaceX, and possibly other Musk companies needing huge volumes of chips for self-driving cars, humanoid robots, and even space-based AI data centers. Intel is supposed to help design, manufacture, and package chips for the project.

The WSJ has a more cautious view today. Elon is aiming for Terafab to reach 100,000 wafers a month, then eventually one million wafers a month. This is an insane scale. Let’s put it in context. One million wafers a month is about 70% of TSMC’s total monthly output across all fabs. TSMC’s largest fabs put roughly 100,000 wafers a month into production. And TSMC’s CEO basically said: fabs take two to three years to build, then another one to two years to ramp. This is a big bottleneck that has been discussed at length.

Overall Intel now has a collection of plausible demand stories that are all pointing in the same direction.

AI agents need more CPUs.
AI systems need advanced packaging (higher ratio of CPUs to GPUs)
The U.S. government wants a domestic leading-edge foundry.
Musk wants impossible amounts of silicon.
Hyperscalers want more supply.

Suddenly, investors are much more willing to entertain a messy, expensive, strategic chip story than they were five years ago. Intel famously missed mobile, which meant that TSMC ran away with enormous manufacturing volume and left Intel with a demand problem. As fab costs grew by orders of magnitude, meaningful demand was a hard prerequisite for continued growth. The pieces of the puzzle are coming together now though, and that’s good for Intel and America’s chip manufacturing prospects.