Intel Shares Plunge 16 Percent After Weak 1st-Quarter Guidance

The company’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings highlighted its struggle to meet demand for AI computing systems.

The Intel logo is displayed outside the company’s headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., on July 26, 2025. Gary Wang/The Epoch Times

Shares of Intel slid more than 16 percent in intraday trading on Jan. 23.

The Santa Clara, California-based semiconductor manufacturer announced its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings on Jan. 22, highlighting its inability to meet voracious industry demand for artificial intelligence (AI) computing systems.

Intel reported fourth-quarter revenue of $13.7 billion, a 4 percent year-over-year decline. Full-year revenue of $52.9 billion was essentially flat from the previous year’s total of $53.1 billion. The company recorded a loss of $0.12 per share, larger than the $0.03 per share loss in the same quarter of 2024.

Meanwhile, Intel forecast softer revenue of between $11.7 billion and $12.7 billion for the first quarter of 2026 due to ongoing foundry issues that are hampering production output. Further losses are expected, as the company projects a first-quarter loss of $0.21 per share.

As of 12:38 p.m. ET on Jan. 23, the company’s shares were down by 16.56 percent.

“I am disappointed that we are not able to fully meet the demand in our markets,” Lip-Bu Tan, Intel’s CEO, said during a conference call on Jan. 22.

“My team and I are working tirelessly to drive efficiency and more output from our fabs, and while yields are in line with our internal plans, they are still below where I want them to be. Accelerating yield improvement will be an important lever in 2026 as we look to better support our customers.”

Tan also outlined Intel’s AI-driven roadmap that includes heightened importance of its X86 architecture and wider development in a new lineup of consumer and business notebook computers (Core Series Ultra 3) with its new 18A manufacturing process that was first brought into production in 2025 at semiconductor foundries in Hillsborough, Oregon, and Chandler, Arizona.

Intel has partnered with key customers to support their data center computing needs in 2026 and is focused on ramping up foundry production, Tan added.

“Over the last several quarters, we have been developing a broader AI and accelerator strategy that we plan to refine in the coming months,” he said.

“Our focus is on the emerging wave of AI workloads—reasoning models, agentic and physical AI, and inference at scale—where we believe Intel can truly disrupt and differentiate.”

Intel CFO David Zisner noted that internal wafer supply constraints are a main roadblock for meeting customer demand and will be most keenly felt in the first quarter of 2026, which led to the weaker earnings forecast.

“Our buffer inventory is depleted, and the mixed shift in wafers towards servers, which began in Q3, will not come out of [fabrication] until late Q1 26,” Zisner told analysts.

Supply issues should begin to ease in the second quarter of 2026 and improve throughout the year, he added. Intel operates 15 wafer fabrication sites in 10 locations, including an additional U.S. facility in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, and three in Israel.