Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said at Splunk's .conf26 conference in Denver this week that the chipmaker is meeting only about 50% of what its customers are asking for, as demand for its processors has outrun its factories. Tan attributed the shortfall to an explosion in demand for central processing units to run artificial intelligence inference, work that leans on CPUs rather than the graphics chips that dominate AI headlines. The shortage is visible in Intel's results: revenue growth accelerated from 3% in the third quarter of 2025 to 7% in the first quarter of 2026 and 25% in the second quarter, when revenue reached $16.1 billion, while the data center and AI segment grew 59% to $6.3 billion and the client computing and physical AI segment grew 13%. Intel guided third-quarter revenue to between $15.8 billion and $16.8 billion, implying growth of about 19% at the midpoint, and its non-GAAP gross margin climbed from 29.7% a year ago to 41% in the first quarter of 2026 and 41.8% in the second quarter, with management expecting 42% in the third quarter. Chief financial officer Dave Zinsner said the company is meaningfully increasing investments in equipment, clean room space, and substrates, and Tan said the 18A process behind its new Panther Lake laptop chips is in high-volume production while its successor, 14A, begins production in the first quarter of 2027.
Intel CorporationIntel is meeting only ~50% of customer demand as AI inference CPU demand outruns its factories, with revenue growth accelerating to 25% and data center/AI up 59%.
NVIDIA Corporation