Intel's data-centric services drive record 15% revenue growth in Q2 2018

Intel declared a record 15% growth in revenue year-on-year in its 2018 second quarter financial results, with income driven predominately by its performance in data-centric services.

Revenue in the second quarter was $17 billion, with Intel's data-centric businesses - including the IoT group, the data centre group, programmable solutions group, and the memory group - growing between 18% and 27% - and 26% on average.

Intel's data-centric services now account for approaching 50% of the company's total revenue.

Although desktop-based sales fell by 1% year-on-year, PC-centric performance grew overall by 6%, with Intel raking in $8.7 billion overall, with notebook chip sales rising 9%. This growth reflecting recent news that global PC shipments grew for the first time since 2012.

After 14 quarters of consecutive decline, research-company Gartner recorded a 1.4% year-on-year rise in shipments in the second quarter of 2018, with analysts saying this was driven by demand in the business market, offsetting weaker consumer demand.

"After five decades in tech, Intel is poised to deliver our third record year in a row. We are uniquely positioned to capitalize on the need to process, store and move data, which has never been more pervasive or more valuable," said Bob Swan, Intel CFO and interim CEO.

The announcement represented Swan's first as interim CEO after its former chief Brian Krzanich stepped down following a 'workplace fling' earlier this year.

"Intel is now competing for a $260 billion market opportunity, and our second quarter results show that we're winning. As a result of the continued strength we are seeing across the business, we are raising our full year revenue and earnings outlook."

Intel has attributed its own PC-centric growth to strong demand for its new generation of chips in both gaming and commercial spaces, particularly the 8th-generation Intel Core vPro processors for business, as well as the i9 processor built for high-performance laptops.

Data-centric growth, meanwhile, was driven by an array of factors including "strong demand from cloud and communications service providers investing to meet the explosive demand for data and to improve the performance of data-intensive workloads like Artificial Intelligence," according to the company.

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