Intel Revenues Plummeted 36 Percent in Q1

Beleaguered microprocessor giant Intel announced that it posted a loss of $2.8 billion on revenues of $11.7 billion in the quarter ending March 31. It’s impossible to overstate how bad this is: that loss is the worst in Intel’s history, and its revenues fell 36 percent year-over-year and haven’t been this low since 2010.

“We delivered solid first-quarter results, representing steady progress with our transformation,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said. “We hit key execution milestones in our data center roadmap and demonstrated the health of the process technology underpinning it. While we remain cautious on the macroeconomic outlook, we are focused on what we can control as we deliver on [our strategy]: driving consistent execution across process and product roadmaps and advancing our foundry business to best position us to capitalize on the $1 trillion market opportunity ahead.”

While most would assume that Intel’s heaviest losses are due to the ongoing downturn in the PC industry, the problems are much deeper than that: Intel’s other two big businesses, Datacenter and AI, and Network and Edge, both suffered similar YOY falls.

But let’s start with PCs: Intel’s Client Computing Group delivered 5.8 billion in revenues, down 38 percent from the year-ago quarter. This somewhat mirrors the industry data from IDC, which reported that PC sales fell 29 percent in the first quarter.

Intel’s Data Center and AI business unit provided another $3.7 billion in revenues, but that was down 39 percent YOY. Intel’s Network and Edge business added $1.5 billion in revenues, down 30 percent YOY.  And Intel Foundry Services, the future of the company, delivered $118 million in revenues, down 24 percent.

Intel is working to lower costs while it builds out an incredibly expensive network of chip-making foundries. It is hoping to make chipsets as advanced as those manufactured by TMSC by 2026, and the company said today it is still on track to achieve that goal.