Catenaa, Friday, January 23, 2026- Intel stock fell by over 16% Friday after its first quarter financial outlook fell short of market expectations, as the company struggled to keep up with demand for chips used in AI data centers.
The chipmaker said it expects first-quarter revenue of $12.2 billion, at the midpoint of its range and below the $12.6 billion projected by Wall Street analysts tracked by Bloomberg.
Intel guided for earnings per share of $0 for the period, short of the estimated $0.08.
Intel corporate Vice President of investor relations, John Pitzer, told Yahoo Finance the softer-than-anticipated guidance was due to supply shortages.
“Our biggest sort of challenge in the near term is we can’t meet all the demand that our customers are giving us,” Pitzer said in an interview. “I think our supply constraints are most pronounced in Q1.”
“We’re working aggressively to get more output out of our fabs,” he added. Fabs are Intel’s semiconductor manufacturing plants.
Meanwhile, Intel reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings and revenue and nodded to rising AI demand for its chips, called CPUs (central processing units), in its press release.
Intel’s earnings per share of $0.15 for the period were slightly above the previous year’s $0.13 and ahead of the $0.09 projected, per Bloomberg data.
The chipmaker’s fourth quarter revenue of $13.7 billion marked a 4% decline from the year-ago period but was higher than the $13.4 billion expected.
Pitzer said Intel’s businesses tied to AI grew “double digits” in the fourth quarter, both sequentially and from the previous year.
The company, the only large-scale, leading-edge US chip manufacturer backed by the federal government and Nvidia, has faced mounting competition from AMD and Arm in its product business, adding to pressure on Intel as its manufacturing division strives to recover from years of setbacks.
