$INTC Just Had Its Best Earnings Beat in 5 Years — And Retail Is Finally Paying Attention

$INTC dropped a earnings report so good it almost felt illegal. Adjusted EPS of $0.29 against a street estimate of $0.01 — not a typo. Revenue came in at $13.6 billion, crushing the $12.4 billion consensus and marking the biggest revenue beat in over five years. Every single analyst estimate got run over. Foundry revenue hit $5.42 billion, up 16% year-over-year, and gross margins beat on supply constraints actually working in Intel's favor for once. Bloomberg Intelligence's Kunjan Sabani called it — and it still exceeded his expectations.

The driver? Agentic AI and inference workloads are sending Xeon server CPU demand through the roof. Turns out GPUs need a head node, and Intel owns that real estate. The stock was already up 80%+ year-to-date before the after-hours pop. Now it's on pace to double in a year — which, for a company everyone wrote off two years ago, is deeply embarrassing for the bears.

Meanwhile, $NOW had its worst day on record — down 16% — after cutting its full-year forecast. Earnings season giveth to the humble and absolutely destroys the overvalued. Choose your fighter wisely.