Intel Corporation has delivered its most stunning financial performance in a quarter of a century, sending its shares soaring more than 24% on Friday to surpass a record set during the dot-com bubble. The surge, which briefly lifted the stock above $83 in early trading, came after the chipmaker reported first-quarter revenue of $13.6bn — roughly $1.2bn above Wall Street’s consensus — and earnings per share of $0.29, far exceeding the $0.02 analysts had expected. For a company that had become synonymous with strategic drift and manufacturing delays, the numbers mark a decisive inflection point.

From the vantage of Silicon Valley, the rally signals that investors are finally willing to believe in a turnaround under chief executive Lip-Bu Tan. In his first full quarter at the helm, Tan has reframed Intel’s core product as an indispensable component of the artificial intelligence ecosystem, arguing that as the industry shifts from training large models to inference — the process of running them in real-world applications — demand for central processing units is accelerating alongside graphics processors. That thesis found immediate traction: Intel’s data-centre segment, once a laggard, posted 22% revenue growth to $5.1bn, a figure that stunned analysts who had written off the company’s relevance in the AI arms race.

Viewed from New York, the earnings release was a cathartic moment for a stock that had not seen its dot-com peak in more than two decades. The company also guided second-quarter revenue in a range of $13.8bn to $14.8bn, beating the $13.7bn forecast, and projected adjusted earnings of $0.20 per share against expectations of $0.19. Even those modest beats were enough to ignite what traders described as an orderly stampede.

But the context matters. The first-quarter net loss of $3.7bn, driven by two large one-time impairment charges, reminds sober observers that Intel’s balance-sheet repair is far from complete. Analysts in London caution that the stock’s historic move may reflect short-covering and pent-up sentiment as much as genuine structural change.

The real test will come in the quarters ahead, as Intel must prove it can sustain margin improvement while executing its ambitious foundry strategy. For now, however, the semiconductor giant has delivered a jolt of credibility that its long-suffering shareholders have craved — and a powerful narrative for the AI era that many had assumed was beyond its reach.