Intel Outlook: Can CPU Price Increases Offset PC Weakness?

Intel Corporation (INTC) will report its financial results for the first quarter of 2026 after the market close today, followed by an analyst conference call at 5 PM. Against the backdrop of the company's stock price rebounding significantly since the beginning of the year, the focus of Wall Street tonight has shifted from whether the company can meet expectations for the first quarter to whether the guidance for the second quarter will be a pleasant surprise.

Institution Consensus: Meeting expectations is likely, but supply remains the ceiling

From Wall Street forecasts, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, and Bernstein all point to the same conclusion for the first quarter: revenue is likely to be within the management guidance range ($11.7 billion to $12.7 billion), with limited but possible room for upside surprise.

All three institutions agree on several key figures: the non-GAAP gross margin for the first quarter is about 34.5%, essentially in line with management guidance; Agentic AI is driving a real and structural increase in demand for server CPUs; Intel is reallocating its internal production capacity from client CPUs to server CPUs at Intel 3 and 7 nodes, but production bottlenecks still limit the growth in shipments for the first quarter, with substantial improvements expected to begin in the second quarter.

On the topic of the Terafab collaboration (with SpaceX, Tesla, xAI) and the repurchasing of Fab 34 in Ireland, all institutions have similar assessments: these events have improved sentiment and long-term narratives, but the visibility of their recent financial contribution remains low, and they should not be factored into substantial expectations in the first quarter results.

Institutional disagreements on second quarter performance outlook

The real suspense tonight is not whether the first quarter can meet expectations, but how management describes the outlook for the second quarter, which is where the institutions disagree.

The core of the disagreement is the recovery speed of CPU shipments and the increase in ASP (Average Selling Price). HSBC is the most aggressive: forecasting a 20% year-on-year increase in CPU shipments for 2026, and a 20% year-on-year increase in ASP, setting their 2026 DCAI (Data Center and AI) division revenue forecast at $22.8 billion, 16% higher than the market consensus; their Q2 2026 revenue forecast of $14.2 billion is about 9% higher than the consensus. HSBC believes that the consensus forecast for DCAI has been continuously reduced since the fourth quarter financial report, significantly underestimating the bottleneck value of processors in the age of Agentic—research shows that approximately 44% of tasks in AI workflows now rely on CPU processing, three to four times more than in the past.

Bernstein takes a more neutral stance. The institution has recently increased their revenue growth forecast for the Xeon processor in 2026 to +36%, while also predicting a significant double-digit increase in the average price of shipments, and raising their gross margin forecast due to reduced dilution of non-controlling interests resulting from the repurchasing of the Irish wafer fab. However, Bernstein has also lowered their expectations for the PC business, believing that memory price pressures will continue to weigh on the Client Computing Group (CCG),直言市场对客户端的一致预期"偏高"。Its Q2 2026 revenue forecast of $12.7 billion is lower than the consensus of $13.1 billion, and its full-year revenue of $53.3 billion is also lower than the consensus of $54.2 billion—but thanks to structural profit improvement driven by higher server ASP, its full-year EPS forecast of $0.82 is higher than the consensus of $0.55. In other words, Bernstein's logic is that revenue may be disappointing, but profit quality is quietly improving.

Deutsche Bank's judgment is the most cautious, maintaining a hold rating and a target price of $45. Deutsche Bank believes that the improvement in server demand is real, but the upside potential has already been fully reflected in the stock price—since April 1, Intel's stock price has risen about 60%, far exceeding the 16% rise of the Nasdaq during the same period. In terms of financial forecasts, Deutsche Bank's forecast for Q2 2026 gross margin (36.1%) is also significantly lower than HSBC's (40.0%), with a gap of nearly four percentage points, reflecting the institutions' fundamental disagreement on Intel's pricing power.

Core Observation