INTC Gaps to $85 After Q1 Blowout, Analyst Targets Left Behind

The Friday Gap

INTC closed Thursday at $77.46, up 18% on the after-hours Q1 print. The cash session on Friday extended the move another leg, with shares trading more than 20% higher in early trading. The HIP-3 perp caught the full overnight-plus-open window: +29.45% over 14 hours, now at $85.49 on $36.5M in 24-hour turnover — a step up from a book that typically does closer to $20M a day.

Thursday's after-hours gap was the print reacting. Friday's continuation is the cash session getting to do the same math on a market that is more than ten times the size of the post-close book: desks that could not fill in the thin after-hours window are sizing on the open, and the shorts that did not cover on the initial spike are covering into the gap.

Price Targets Are Now Obsolete

The sell side went into the print under-covered. HSBC's April 21 upgrade to Buy with a $95 target was the most aggressive live call on the street. Everyone else was well below. In the two weeks before earnings, Benchmark raised to $76, Stifel to $65, Susquehanna to $65, Bernstein to $60, and BNP Paribas to $60 on the morning of the print itself.

With INTC at $85.49, the median analyst price target is roughly $20 below spot. Only HSBC's $95 is still a live ceiling. That is the setup that produces a second round of PT-raise headlines on Monday — every model on the street has to be re-baselined with Q1 actuals and the Q2 guide, and most come out well above today's cash print once they redo the math.

What the Print Actually Delivered

The Q1 report was a real blowout on the line items that drive a model. Adjusted EPS of $0.29 against $0.01 consensus is a 29x beat on the bottom line. Revenue of $13.58 billion came in roughly $943 million above estimates. Non-GAAP gross margin of 41% crushed a 34.5% bar. And Data Center and AI revenue rose 22% year-over-year to $5.1 billion — the specific segment the Terafab, Apollo Ireland, and HSBC upgrade story was all underwriting.

The Q2 guide is what extends the move rather than fades it. Intel guided revenue of $13.8-14.8 billion and EPS of $0.20, against the street at $13.0 billion and $0.09 — a $1.3 billion midpoint beat on the next quarter's top line, and more than double consensus EPS. CEO Lip-Bu Tan attributed the pull-forward to agentic-AI demand on Intel 18A and advanced packaging, with Google Cloud on Xeon as the named anchor customer.

The bear case has not disappeared. GAAP net loss widened to $3.7 billion on $4.1 billion of restructuring and Mobileye impairment, and adjusted free cash flow was negative $2 billion on $5 billion of foundry capex. But those are balance-sheet items the market has been staring at for quarters. What moved is the revenue line and the margin line, and those are what a price-target model starts with.

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