Intel delivers strong Q3, touts AI, cloud pipeline
Intel reported strong third quarter results and CEO Brian Krzanich said the company's product lineup is "the strongest it has ever been."
Krzanich's optimism is fueled by record earnings that only partly reflect Intel's pivot to focus on data and artificial intelligence and markets such as autonomous driving.
The company reported third quarter earnings of $4.5 billion, or 94 cents a share, on revenue of $16.1 billion, up 2 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings for the third quarter were $1.01 a share.
Intel aims to be inside your artificial intelligence stack
On a conference call, Krzanich said:
Our strategy is to be the driving force of the data revolution across technologies and industries. Our data-centric businesses are the company's growth engine. Individually, these businesses provide great value to our customers. Collectively, they're solving our customers' problems in a way that no individual business or product could. We've built a collection of capabilities that is unmatched. At the same time, our PC business remains central to our success. It's a source of great profit, cash flow, scale and intellectual property. We've made great progress in both our data-centric and PC-centric businesses over the last few months.
He added that cloud service provider is 60 percent of Intel's data center group revenue.
Krzanich added that AI is likely to drive the entire Intel portfolio. He said:
Intel is a leader in AI inference from the core of the data center to autonomous vehicle, out to the edge devices where low power is especially critical. Second, artificial intelligence takes meaningful and will require computing solutions that are tailored for the workload, the environment and the user, rather than a one size fits all.
Here's a look at the growth by division.
As for the outlook, Intel projected fourth quarter revenue of $16.3 million give or take $500 million with earnings per share of about 80 cents a share.
For the year, Intel said it will deliver revenue of $62 billion with earnings per share of $2.93 a share.