# Intel Cuts 103 Jobs in Its Fastest Growing Data Center and AI Division > Source: > Published: 2026-08-04 03:15:48+00:00 *Intel is cutting 103 jobs in the exact division that just posted 22% revenue growth, and the timing tells you a lot about how nervous Wall Street has gotten about AI spending.* Intel confirmed it's eliminating 103 positions across four Bay Area offices, effective August 15, and every one of them sits inside the Data Center and AI Group, the unit currently carrying the company's turnaround story. The cuts break down unevenly: 67 at the SC-12 facility on Juliette Lane, 24 at the Robert Noyce Building headquarters, 10 more at a second Juliette Lane site, and just two at the Laurelwood Road office, according to TrendForce, which first reported the layoffs, with Benzinga later confirming the breakdown with Intel directly. Here's the part that doesn't add up on paper. This is Intel's best-performing division. Data Center and AI Group revenue hit $5.05 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up 22% year-over-year and well ahead of the $4.41 billion analysts had penciled in. Two quarters later, the wider company reported $16.1 billion in second-quarter revenue on July 23, up 25% from a year earlier, Intel's strongest growth rate in more than fifteen years, according to CNBC. So why gut the group that's actually working? CEO Lip-Bu Tan has run Intel since March 2025 on a simple premise: cut cost everywhere, even in the parts that are winning, and let the market reward the discipline. He's already trimmed Intel's global headcount by roughly 15% since taking over. Investors have loved it. Intel shares have climbed more than 300% over the past year, a rally built almost entirely on the belief that Tan will keep the balance sheet lean while data center and AI chip demand does the heavy lifting. Trimming 103 roles inside a five-billion-dollar-a-quarter business isn't a retreat from that story. It's the story, applied literally to the one division everyone assumed was safe. That's a different kind of layoff than the ones that hit Intel's foundry or legacy PC groups over the past two years. Those cuts came from businesses that were losing money or losing relevance. This one comes from a group Intel itself credits with pulling agentic AI workloads onto server CPUs and custom silicon, work that's actually converting into beaten estimates. Cutting there sends a specific message: even a hot division doesn't get a pass on headcount efficiency. That's a harder pill for employees to swallow than a cut tied to a struggling unit. ## The rally is wobbling right now, too The layoffs land at an awkward moment for the stock. Intel shares fell nearly 10% on August 3, briefly ranking among the worst performers in the S&P 500, after Samsung's earnings report reignited fears across the whole chip sector about memory oversupply and AI-spending sustainability, according to Yahoo Finance and 24/7 Wall St. New U.S. tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on imports from 60 countries piled on fresh cost uncertainty for chipmakers with global supply chains. Intel had traded above $110 just weeks earlier. By early August it was trading closer to $90. Rosenblatt raised its price target on the stock to $65 from $50 but kept a Sell rating, well below the roughly $112 average Wall Street target. None of that changes what Intel's Data Center and AI Group actually delivered this year. But it changes how a 103-person layoff inside that group reads to investors watching every signal for whether AI capital spending is starting to cool. A cut in a losing division is cleanup. A cut in a winning one, right as the sector gets twitchy about oversupply, looks like a company hedging before anyone else admits they should. Intel hasn't said the layoffs are tied to softening demand, and the Q1 and Q2 numbers give no reason to think they are. What they show instead is a CEO who treats efficiency as permanent policy. That's not an emergency measure. Whether Wall Street reads that as prudence or as an early warning sign will probably matter more to Intel's next quarter than the 103 jobs themselves. **Also read:** [AI Search Is Turning Breaking-News Visibility Into a Winner-Take-Most Game](https://startupfortune.com/ai-search-is-turning-breaking-news-visibility-into-a-winner-take-most-game/) • [AWS Bets on Superblocks to Make Vibe Coding Safe for the Enterprise](https://startupfortune.com/aws-bets-on-superblocks-to-make-vibe-coding-safe-for-the-enterprise/) • [FalconX Cuts 10 Percent of Its Staff as Crypto's Institutional Side Cracks](https://startupfortune.com/falconx-cuts-10-percent-of-its-staff-as-cryptos-institutional-side-cracks/)