Intel just posted its fastest revenue growth in 15 years. $16.1 billion versus a $14.4 billion estimate. The stock jumped 11%. The company everyone wrote off just had one of its best quarters in over a decade.
$16.1 billion.
Against a $14.4 billion estimate.
That is not a small beat. That is a 12% upside surprise from a company that spent years being declared irrelevant by the market.
Michael Burry shorted the semiconductor index calling it a pure form of overvaluation rarely seen. South Korea's chip-heavy KOSPI crashed 20% in July. The broader AI trade was showing signs of exhaustion.
And Intel just printed its fastest revenue growth since 2009.
CEO Lip-Bu Tan said it directly. AI is driving unprecedented demand for compute.
Not elevated demand. Not strong demand.
Unprecedented.
The data center buildout numbers back that up completely. US data center construction spending already crossed $50.7 billion annually, surpassing government transportation spending for the first time in history. Super Micro just reported $60 billion in new AI server orders and surged 20% in a single session.
Every piece of compute infrastructure that goes into those data centers needs chips. Not just Nvidia GPUs. Intel CPUs, network processors, and AI accelerators are all part of the stack.
The AI trade did not die when South Korea crashed.
It rotated. Away from the most crowded positions. Into the infrastructure layer that the buildout actually requires to function.
Intel was the most hated name in semiconductors heading into this earnings.
Unprecedented demand does not care about sentiment.
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