Intel Just Had One Of Their Biggest Earnings Calls Ever – Here’s What You Need To Know

$INTC is massively up after beating revenue guidance for Q1 '26 and posting strong guidance for Q2. Foundry and DCAI both showed healthy growth over the last quarter, while Client Computing slumped slightly due to inflationary pressures and the ongoing RAM crisis.

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Some might say that the explosive growth in Intel's stock price isn't justified by its results this quarter. After reviewing Intel's earnings call, I personally disagree. Here are the most important quotes from the call.

Intel Foundry - 18A Beating Internal Yield Projections, 14A Development Going Smoothly

"We have made steady progress with Intel 4 and Intel 3, and 18A yields are now running ahead of the internal projections, representing a meaningful inflection in our execution and our factory finished goods output."

- Lip Bu Tan, Intel Earnings Call Q1 '26

As Intel Foundry's flagship process, a lot is riding on the success of 18A. Famously, ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger once stated, "I've bet the whole company on 18A." 18A serves as the foundation of products spanning from lowly Wildcat Lake to lofty Clearwater Forest. Therefore, improving yield rates on 18A is an imperative for the company, especially as products on previous nodes continue to be capacity-constrained. Beating internal yield ramp projections is a great sign for the health of this process node and strengthens Intel's ability to bring external customers on board.

"Intel 14A maturity yield and performance are outpacing Intel 18A at a similar point in time, and we continue to develop PDKs with multiple customers actively evaluating the technology. ... We expect to see earlier design commitments emerge beginning in the second half of 2026 and expanding into the first half of 2027."

- Lip-Bu Tan, Intel Earnings Call Q1 '26

14A ramp-up and yield continue to develop at a healthy pace, and if targets are met, we could see meaningful external customer commitments begin to emerge in H2 ’26. As of now, Intel has yet to confirm any internal products for 14A, but high-volume production for Intel products on 14A is rumored around H2 '27, meaning confirmation of 14A for future Intel products might be coming soon.

Data Center and AI (DCAI) - Lip-Bu Bullish On Accelerators, Advanced Packaging

When asked about Intel's competitive advantage against x86 or ARM competitors, Lip-Bu Tan expressed confidence in the firm's ability to utilise advanced packaging and foundry-level integration for XPUs (mixed-architecture solutions).

"The other part is, I think we have a very big advantage with not just the CPU, we have advanced packaging and foundry. ... I think overall, I think it's exciting time that we call it the XPU. Besides CPU, we're also quietly building up the GPU with a new hire. We are moving into the accelerators, and so that we can serve the customer from the edge and then to the physical AI, and then really drive some of the new initiative to drive the competitiveness."

- Lip-Bu Tan, Intel Earnings Call Q1 '26

After the disaster that was Falcon Shores - Intel's scrapped GPU accelerator - Intel pivoted its AI accelerator strategy, first announcing Jaguar Shores (a rack-scale solution, about which little is known) and then recently Crescent Island, a low-cost accelerator based on the Xe3P architecture with 160GB of LPDDR5X memory.

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Although these products could prove competitive, without a direct rival to AMD’s MI350 and upcoming MI450 series, it is difficult to argue that Intel has truly entered the AI inference accelerator market. This is where Lip-Bu Tan's statements get interesting - if Intel has upsized the GPU team specifically for inference accelerators, AMD's future offerings could face stiff competition with Intel stepping into the ring with a full-fledged, HBM-equipped accelerator. Regardless, no matter how this all plays out, Intel's inference accelerator offerings are certainly something to keep an eye on.

CPU's Could Start To Outnumber GPUs For Agentic Workloads

When asked about Intel's TAM (Total Addressable Market) for CPU products, CFO David Zinsner had this to say.

 "If you look at training solutions, they're generally running in the kind of seven to eight GPUs to one CPU. As we look into inference, it's probably getting into the three to four to one kind of level. As you get into agentic and multi-agent, it's one potentially even flip in the other direction a little bit. That's one way to think about it. As you think about the growth rate now going forward, it's going to become a significant part of the AI TAM."

- David Zinsner, Intel Earnings Call Q1 '26

As agentic workloads explode and demand continues to increase, CPUs could start to outnumber GPUs - meaning you would have multiple CPUs handling agent orchestration in the control plane, with just one GPU handling LLM inference. This would certainly represent a massive upset to traditional AI deployments, where a single CPU feeds multiple GPUs running inference in parallel.

If such a scenario comes to pass, Intel's leading packaging capabilities and supply chain control would certainly afford it a massive competitive advantage, as Lip-Bu Tan stressed numerous times throughout the call. We'll have to wait and see how the agentic AI story develops, but Intel's optimism here doesn't seem to be misplaced.

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