Coming off its largest quarterly loss in company history back in the first quarter this year, things had to get better for Intel, right?
In the second quarter of 2023, Intel beat its previous guidance for the quarter. It posted revenue of $12.9 billion, which was down 15% year over year from the $15.3 reported in Q2 2022, but exceeded estimates. Net income for the second quarter was $1.5 billion, up from the $500 million loss posted for the same quarter in 2022. The company said it is now forecasting third-quarter 2023 revenue of approximately $12.9 billion to $13.9 billion.
Most of Intel’s revenue segments, including client computing, data center and AI, network and edge and Mobileye, had lower revenue than the same period last year, but the fledgling Intel Foundry Services gave the company hope for the future, coming in at $232 million in revenue, 307% higher than the same quarter last year.
All of this comes after a first quarter in which Intel saw revenue slide 36% year over year, along with a record-breaking $2.76 billion loss.
Many company observers were wondering recently if Intel could ride the AI wave as well as Nvidia, whose stock value has boomed since generative AI has become a top market influencer. Despite revenue for Intel’s data center and AI segment dropping 15% year over year to $4 billion in the second quarter, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said in prepared comments on the firm’s earnings call that AI is paying off for Intel.
“In Q2, we began to see real benefits from our accelerating AI opportunity. We believe we are in a unique position to drive the best possible TCO [total cost of ownership] for our customers at every node on the AI continuum.”
Then, repeating almost verbatim a point that Nvidia executives have been making about AI since 2021, he stated, “Our strategy is to democratize AI – scaling it and making it ubiquitous across the full continuum of workloads and usage models.”
Gelsinger added. “We are championing an open ecosystem with a full suite of silicon and software IP to drive AI from cloud to enterprise, network, edge and client, across data prep, training and inference, in both discrete and integrated solutions. As we have previously outlined, AI is one of five superpowers – along with pervasive connectivity, ubiquitous compute, cloud-to-edge and sensing – underpinning a $1 trillion semi industry by 2030.”