Intel reported first-quarter net income of $5.66 billion compared with $3.97 billion, in the year-ago period.

Revenue jumped roughly 23 percent to $19.8 billion from $16.06 billion in the year-ago quarter; Intel’s quarterly revenue topped $20 billion for the first time in the fourth quarter.

Analysts have suggested that the company stands to benefit in the short term from the pandemic, as the need for laptops and cloud-computing power to support workers moving home from the office is thought to have spurred sales of its core PC and server chips.

Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy noted that “like other tech giants, Intel pulled its annual guide, but it did keep it for the second quarter which was 'pretty good'”.

Intel shares sank more than five percent in after-hours trading, and took other chip stocks along with it: AMD, Microchip and Applied Materials sank more than two per cent in the extended trading session among semiconductor companies included in the S&P 500 index SPX, -0.05 percent . Intel stock declined 1.8 percent

For the first quarter, Intel’s data-center group, or DCG, revenue jumped 43 percent to $7 billion, while analysts expected it to rise 29 percent to $6.32 billion. Intel’s largest segment — client computing, the traditional PC group — rose 14 percent to $9.8 billion, with analysts expecting an 8.8 percent rise to $9.34 billion from a year ago.

Intel said it sees strong data-center demand in the first half of the year, and expects weak enterprise and government demand in the second half of the year.

Bob Swan, Intel chief executive, on the conference call, said: “We expect that demand for the cloud folks, the strong demand, to continue and possibly even going into the second half of the year. The trends are relatively encouraging. The demand signals are very high."

Sales from auto, industrial and retail customers are down, Intel said, while PC demand is high because of work- and learn-from-home initiatives.