Intel went up 20%, and the CPU was going to take what was lost back in Age Age

Last night, the stock price of Ingweida once touched $70 on the plate, then rose by 20 per cent because its latest financial report exceeded everyone's expectations。

ON THURSDAY, INTEL DISCLOSED THAT THE FIRST QUARTER OF THE FINANCIAL YEAR WAS 2026, WITH $13.6 BILLION, AN INCREASE OF 7 PER CENT OVER THE SAME PERIOD, AND 11 PER CENT HIGHER THAN WALL STREET. NON-GAAP PROCEEDS OF 0.29 US DOLLARS PER SHARE, COMPARED WITH A COMPARISON ANALYST'S PROJECTION OF 0.01 US DOLLARS, WHICH IS 29 TIMES HIGHER THAN EXPECTED, AND WHICH IS A VERY RARE DIFFERENCE IN LARGE STOCK HOLDINGS. AFTER THE NEWS, THE INTEL STOCK PRICE ROSE BY 20 PERCENT。

The Q2 guide also gives a more radical direction, with 13.8 billion to 14.8 billion dollars in the collection range, which is above the median expected by consensus. The new CEO Lip-Bu Tan used a line at a teleconference as a performance note to the effect that CPU was re-embedding itself in the essential foundation of the AI era。

THIS IS ONE OF INTEL'S MOST DISCUSSED PROPOSITIONS IN THE MARKET IN THE LAST TWO YEARS, AND THE COMPANY WAS THOUGHT TO HAVE COMPLETELY MISSED THE FIRST WAVE OF AI。

ON THE ONE HAND, THERE IS NO GPU THAT CAN BE USED AGAINST YING WEIDA, AND ON THE OTHER HAND, ADVANCED MANUFACTURING NODES DO NOT KEEP UP WITH THE BUILD-UP. BUT OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS, AS MORE AND MORE AI DEPLOYMENTS HAVE SHIFTED FROM MODEL TRAINING TO REASONING AND THE ORGANIZATION OF AUTONOMOUS "SMART" BODIES, THE CPU, A "COMPUTER BRAIN" THAT WAS ONCE SEEN AS THE FOUNDATION MONEY, HAS BEEN RE-NEEDED. INTEL'S REBOUND THIS SEASON WAS THE FIRST FINANCIAL LANDING OF THIS TECHNICAL NARRATIVE。

DATA CENTRE OPERATIONS EXIT U-SHAPED REVERSE

DISMANTLING Q1 'S 13.6 BILLION, THE MOST CRITICAL CHANGE COMES FROM THE DATA CENTRE AND AI (DCAI). ACCORDING TO INTEL, DCAI RECEIVED $5.1 BILLION IN SINGLE-SEASON REVENUE, A 22 PER CENT INCREASE OVER THE SAME PERIOD AND A RECORD HIGH。

It's not a one-off outbreak. Taking time back in 2025, DCAI managed to reach $4.1 billion in Q1, $3.9 billion in Q2, and $4.1 billion in Q3, which, in 2025, once led the market to suspect that the so-called "CPU recovery" was merely a narrative. And then to Q4, according to Intel's info compiled by Tom's Hardware, DCAI jumped from $4.1 billion in Q3 to $4.7 billion, the ring ratio + 15 per cent, which is the fastest single-quarter cycle growth of the company in 10 years。

The amount of Q1226.51 billion allowed the entire curve to draw a clear U-shaped valley bottom in 2025, turning at Q4 2025, confirming Q1 2026. The management explained that Xeon 6 had started the size of the Granite Rapids processor and added the AI infrastructure refreshing cycle. The company even volunteered to sacrifice a portion of its client's CPU capacity, handing the crystal round over to the data centre, raising the profitability of the entire DCAI plate. According to Intel Q3-2025 financial statements, the operating profitability of this block rose from 9.2 per cent to 23.4 per cent, almost 2.5 times。

THE SAME AI NARRATIVE. THREE FAMILIES PAINT THREE MOVEMENTS

Put the Intel round back in a peer comparison and you'll see a more interesting picture than the drop。

BY APRIL 2026, USING JANUARY 2023 AS THE BENCHMARK, THE INGWEIDA STOCK PRICE INDEX HAD BEEN PUSHED TO 1023, AMD TO 406 AND INTEL TO 245. AS WITH THE THREE LINES, THE ENDPOINT IS NEARLY FIVE TIMES DIFFERENT. BUT WHAT IS EVEN MORE WORTHWHILE IS THE SHAPE OF THE BLUE LINE IN INTEL, WHICH IS NOT SLOWLY CLIMBING, WHICH FIRST WENT DOWN TO 64 IN SEPTEMBER 2024 (EQUIVALENT TO A 36 PER CENT DROP FROM THE START) AND THEN DREW A V-WORD REBOUND, WHICH WAS FOLLOWED BY 245 IN EARLY 2026。

This is actually a two-time pricing by the market of "Who really earns money in the AI capital cycle." Between 2023 and 2024, money went to Inverda because training required GPU. AMD to eat the second cake in the MI300 series and follow the stock price. Intel was systematically removed from the AI trading list because the Gaudi accelerator sold less than expected, and the advanced production was lagging. According to third-party estimates quoted in Fortune in January 2025, the share of Inverda in the AI chip market rose from 25 per cent in 2021 to 86 per cent in 2024 and intel from 68 per cent to 6 per cent。

The second pricing took place in the second half of 2025 and early in 2026, when the market began to revisit the issue of whether the structure of the calculus of demand would change if AI went from training to reasoning and Agent. The answer to this question directly determines how far the Blue Line in Intel can go。

The closer the scene, the closer Agent, the closer the CPU to the center of the stage

Disassembly AI work streams into three types of scenarios in which the weights of CPUs vary greatly. According to the Deloitte 2026 Technology Trends Report, CPUs in the large model training phase account for only about 8 per cent of the workflow bottlenecks, with 92 per cent of the remaining calculator pressure being synchronized with the GPU clusters, which is the main site of Inverda. The CPU weight went up to 25 per cent into a large-scale reasoning phase, but the parallel GPU throughput and visible bandwidth remained bottlenecks。

The real change took place in the Agent scenario. According to a study published jointly by the Georgian Institute of Technology and Intel in November 2025, the CPU processing of the Agent workstream for the deployment of tools accounts for 50 to 90 per cent of the total delay in the process, depending on the type of tool and the complexity of the organization. In other words, when an AI Agent does things like "calling API, pulling data, coordinating subtasks, managing context memory", it's not GPU, it's CPU。

This trend is quantifiable. Deloitte estimates that the burden of reasoning as a percentage of AI ' s total capacity is about 1/3 in 2023, about 1/2 in 2025 and is expected to reach 2/3 in 2026. According to Futurum Group, the size of the CPU market for servers will increase from $26 billion in 2025 to $60 billion in 2030, faster than the historical long-term average. The more specific signal is the OpenAI disclosure calculator road map, a company that plans to gain hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art British GPUs, as well as tens of millions of CPUs that can be extended to support the Agent task load. GPU's still the boss, but the CPU's volume level was put in the same business for the first time。

THE REBOUND DIDN'T START WITH Q1 2026

PUTTING INTEL'S FIVE-YEAR SHARE PRICE TOGETHER WITH SIX KEY EVENTS, 20% OF Q1'S BALANCE IS ACTUALLY THE END OF A SERIES OF EARLIER DECISIONS。

In February 2021, Pat Gelsinger returned to the CEO and came out with the "IDM 2.0" strategy to make Intel both a chip designer and an open, round-generation plant. When Gudi 3 was released in April 2024, Intel set the target for the sale of the 2024 AI accelerator at $500 million。

On 2 August 2024, Q222024 reported an explosion and collected 12.8 billion dollars a year down, GAAP earned - $0.38 per share, announced 15 per cent reduction and suspension of dividends, and a 26 per cent drop in stock prices per day, the worst single day since 1974. According to Intel disclosure at the time, management subsequently admitted that Gaudi3 had been unable to meet the $500 million target throughout the year and that an inventory of $300 million had been written down。

According to the Intel official announcement, on 1 December 2024, Gelsinger resigned and the company entered the temporary joint CEO phase. In February 2025, the new management decided to cancel the "Falcon Shores" of the independent GPU project to Bill Weeda, recognizing that self-study of the AI accelerator route would not be able to escape the ecological locks in Weeda. On March 18th, 2025, the former Cadence CEO, a semiconductor, Lip-Bu Tan officially became Intel CEO. This time-point corresponds to the intel stock price of $22, which is only 20 percent higher than the September 2024 low of $18。

From Lip-Bu Tan to this Q1 financial report, the Intel stock price rose from $22 to $65 before the financial report, and 20 per cent of the stacking board means just touching around $78. If August 2024 to December 2024 is the dark period of the company, then the moment when the real rebound starts is not Q1 2026, but the moment when Falcon Shores was cancelled and Tan was chosen as CEO. The company gave up its fantasy of Bill Weirda and went back to the CPU that it really did。

TWENTY-NINE TIMES THE EPS SUPER-EXPECTED IS A FINANCIAL SIGNAL, BUT IT'S ACTUALLY TWO THINGS HAPPENING AT THE SAME TIME. THE MARKET BEGAN TO REPRICING THE POSITION OF CPU IN THE AI ARCHITECTURE, AND INTEL JUST COMPLETED THE MANAGEMENT TURNOVER AND PRODUCT LINE TRADE. NEITHER OF THESE THINGS HAPPENED TO Q1。