Intel exec says the AI rush isn't denting its business, and instead brings 'a lot of opportunity'

By Emily Bary

Intel's CFO says his company's CPUs can benefit from the AI wave even though GPUs are currently getting a lot of the buzz

Intel Corp.'s (INTC) chief financial officer said that the June quarter is shaping up well thus far for the chip maker, and he threw cold water on fears that Intel's business could be suffering as a result of greater interest in graphics processing units that help with artificial-intelligence tasks.

"Some might have a concern" as to whether the buzz around generative AI was impacting the organic growth of Intel's central processing units, CFO David Zinsner said in response to an analyst's question at a TD Cowen conference Wednesday, but he and his team "don't see it."

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"In fact, actually, when you look at how things are trending, linearity has been great this quarter for us, which is obviously good in terms of how that will play out in terms of the revenue side, but also good in terms of kind of cash collection," Zinsner said, according to a transcript provided by AlphaSense/Sentieo.

He added that Intel previously gave a forecast for $11.5 billion to $12.5 billion in quarterly revenue, and it now expects to fall within the top half of that range.

Zinsner sees ways for Intel to benefit from the AI craze, even though GPUs, like those from Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), are currently getting the buzz. "As things proliferate into the network into the enterprise data center into the PC space into the edge compute, a lot of that will be handled more off of CPUs," he said.

AI will "transcend" GPUs, in his view, and "cover products in the CPU space."

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"We just see a lot of opportunity in AI that we'll be able to get the tailwind from as we progress over the next few years," he added.

Intel shares were up 3.8% in midday trading Wednesday and leading S&P 500 gainers. The stock has been in recovery mode lately, rallying 13.7% over the past three sessions, after slumping 5.5% last Thursday amid concerns that the company wasn't well positioned to capitalize on the AI wave.

-Emily Bary

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05-31-23 1245ET

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