Intel once rose by more than 10% after the market closed, and second-quarter revenue increased by 25% year-on-year; AI demand drove a surge in data center business
| Friday, July 24, 2026 | NO.1 Intel once rose by more than 10% after the market opened, and second-quarter revenue increased by 25%. AI demand drove a surge in data center business. On July 24, local time, Intel announced its second-quarter financial report for 2026, with revenue of US$16.13 billion, a year-on-year increase of 25%, nearly 12% higher than market expectations, and the fastest quarterly growth rate in the past 15 years. Among them, data center and AI business revenue increased by 59% year-on-year to US$6.3 billion, and foundry business revenue increased by 31% year-on-year.
| Friday, July 24, 2026 | NO.1 Intel once rose by more than 10% after the market closed, and its revenue in the second quarter increased by 25%. AI demand drove a surge in data center business. On July 24, local time, Intel announced its second quarter 2026 financial report, with revenue of US$16.13 billion, a year-on-year increase of 25%, nearly 12% higher than market expectations, and the fastest quarterly growth rate in the past 15 years. Among them, data center and AI business revenue increased by 59% year-on-year to US$6.3 billion, and foundry business revenue increased by 31% year-on-year. The company expects third-quarter revenue of 15.8 billion to 16.8 billion US dollars, higher than market expectations, and said that AI is continuing to drive growth in global computing power demand. Buoyed by its performance and performance guidance, Intel's stock price rose by more than 10% after the market closed. Comment: The demand for AI computing power continues to drive the growth of the data center business. Intel's performance exceeded expectations and raised its performance guidance, helping to boost market expectations for its business recovery and AI layout. NO.2 AMD releases Helios AI platform to fully challenge Nvidia’s AI infrastructure On July 23, local time, AMD released the new generation Helios rack-level AI platform, Instinct MI450 AI accelerator and sixth-generation EPYC "Venice" server CPU at the Advancing AI 2026 conference. Among them, Helios has entered the full production stage and is expected to begin delivery at the end of the third quarter of this year. AMD said that Helios is better than Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin platform in some key performance indicators such as AI reasoning, and OpenAI is expected to deploy the platform on a large scale. AMD also predicts that by 2030, the AI accelerator and data center CPU market sizes will reach US$1.4 trillion and US$220 billion respectively. Comment: AMD is accelerating the construction of an AI infrastructure platform covering chips, servers and software to further enhance its competitiveness with Nvidia in the enterprise-level AI market. NO.3 SpaceX plans to build a new AI data center in Texas to increase its computing power infrastructure layout On July 23, local time, according to media reports, Musk’s SpaceX AI is planning to build at least one new AI data center in Texas, the United States. The scale is expected to be no less than its data center in Memphis, which has about 1 gigawatt of computing power and hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs. According to reports, the company has investigated multiple potential locations and is considering options such as building new or renovating existing facilities to further expand its AI computing capabilities and cloud service business layout. Comment: As the demand for AI computing power continues to grow, technology companies are accelerating the deployment of ultra-large-scale data centers, and competition in AI infrastructure is further heating up. NO.4 The European Union fined Google a billion dollars based on the DMA and required it to complete rectifications within 60 days. On July 23, local time, the European Commission imposed a fine of 890 million euros (approximately US$1 billion) on Google in accordance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), involving violations in the search business and Google Play Store, and required Google to adjust search rankings and app store rules within 60 days to treat third-party services fairly. This is the first time the EU has imposed penalties on Google under the DMA, and it is also the third penalty imposed by the bill on a large technology platform. Comment: The EU continues to strengthen antitrust supervision of large technology platforms, and digital platform compliance requirements are further tightened. Global technology supervision is still escalating. NO.5 Anthropic plans to require employees to reduce stock holdings according to a preset plan to prepare for the IPO On July 23, local time, according to media reports, in the process of preparing for its initial public offering, the AI start-up Anthropic is considering requiring ordinary employees to sell their shares using a 10b5-1 preset trading plan to reduce the risk of insider trading and reduce the impact of concentrated shareholding reductions on the stock price. According to reports, the company is still discussing the shareholder reduction ratio and lock-up period arrangements on the first day of listing, and the IPO may be launched as early as September this year. Comment: As AI companies continue to enter the capital market, improving employee shareholding and stock circulation mechanisms is becoming an important preparation before IPO.