Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan crushed Wall Street targets on his 1-year anniversary: We are embracing our ‘paranoid’ roots

Intel has spent the last few years trying to reinvent itself and prove it’s still relevant in an AI-centric world dominated by Nvidia’s chips. On Thursday, as Intel crushed Wall Street financial targets, the company had a new message: There’s nothing wrong with being a 58-year-old maker of PC and server microprocessors. “We are embracing our roots as data driven, paranoid, and engineering driven,” CEO Lip Bu Tan said at the start of the company’s Q1 earnings conference call, referencing the famous “only the paranoid survive” philosophy of Andy Grove, the late cofounder of Intel. Shares of Intel surged more than 22% in after hours trading Thursday after the company reported first-quarter results. Instead of the 2% decrease in revenue that analysts were expecting for the first three months of the year, Intel grew revenue 7% year-over-year to $13.6 billion. Revenue in the current quarter will range between $13.8 billion and $14.8 billion, Intel said, well above the $13.06 billion analysts have been expecting. Demand for Intel’s central processing units (CPU) chips, which are based on its longstanding x86 architecture, is booming, the company said. In fact, revenue would have been even higher had it been able to produce more of the chips. “A year ago the conversation around Intel was about whether we could survive,” Tan said. “Today it’s about how quickly we can add manufacturing capacity and scale our supply to meet enormous demand for our products.” It was hardly an exaggeration when it comes to the bleak outlook for the company, which he joined as CEO in March 2025 , a few months after Pat Gelsinger was ousted from the top job. At the time, many observers, including former board members , wondered whether the company should be broken apart, with its manufacturing facilities sold or spun into a separate business. A few months after Tan started, the U.S. government bought a 10% stake in Intel , helping to shore up the company in a deal the Trump administration said wa…