NXP Semiconductors paces for its best day ever after earnings beat

NXP Semiconductors shares rose 26% Wednesday, on track for its best day ever since the company went public in 2010.

The semiconductor manufacturer reported first-quarter earnings Tuesday that blew away Wall Street’s estimates.

The Dutch company reported adjusted earnings of $3.05 per share, beating LSEG expectations of $2.95. The company’s revenue of $3.18 billion, a 12% increase year-over-year, also beat the LSEG forecast of $3.16 billion.

CEO Rafael Sotomayor attributed the growth to “industrial and automotive processing that supports software-defined vehicles and physical AI.”

The spread of artificial intelligence has rallied chipmakers as data center demand soars. On the company’s earnings call Tuesday, Sotomayor highlighted the growing role of NXP’s data center applications.

The company reported about $200 million in revenue related to data centers last year. Sotomayor said he anticipates over $500 million in 2026.

Unlike other semiconductor companies like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, NXP does not make graphics processing units. Its chips, largely used in automobiles, power infrastructure tasks for data centers rather than AI compute.

“As data center scales, the constraints are not just compute and memory,” Sotomayor said on the earnings call. “They’re also power, cooling, uptime, secure controls — and I think this is where NXP plays.”

Analysts reacted positively to the report.

TD Cowen raised its price target from $250 to $310 after the report. Morgan Stanley also increased its target to $335, up from $299.

“NXP clearly signaled the confidence and clarity needed to support the long-term story – one we have believed in, with clearer visibility now around execution,” Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore wrote in a note.

The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), which tracks the sector, has climbed about 30% this month.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to remove Intel as a maker of GPUs. Intel only makes CPUs.