A 95-year-old Texas chipmaker better known for classroom calculators than silicon wafers for hyperscalers just posted its third-biggest single-day gain since going public.
• What’s going on TXN shares?
Texas Instruments Inc. (NASDAQ:TXN) jumped 19.4% on Thursday after first-quarter results and second-quarter guidance trounced expectations. In more than four decades of trading, the stock has produced a stronger single-session gain on only two days: Oct. 31, 1983, and Oct. 19, 2000.
On a weekly basis, the stock is up more than 20% heading into Friday’s close, its best five-day stretch since December 2000.
The move is striking for two reasons. First, Texas Instruments had spent the past three years as the perennial laggard of the semiconductor complex.
Second, the catalyst is not what most investors would expect from a company with consumer brand recognition that still rests on the TI-83 graphing calculator sitting in every high school math classroom.
The catalyst is artificial intelligence infrastructure.
From Classroom Icon To Data Center Plumbing
For decades, Texas Instruments occupied a cultural niche few chipmakers ever achieve. Its calculators — the TI-30, TI-83, TI-84 — were standard issue in schools and universities across the U.S.
The broader public knew the brand, but the revenue mix did not follow.
Today, calculators and the legacy Other segment account for roughly 4% of quarterly sales. The real engine is analog semiconductors, the unglamorous chips that convert real-world signals such as sound, temperature, voltage and current into digital data.
Those chips sit in cars, factories, medical devices, communications equipment and, increasingly, data centers. Analog plus embedded processing now make up more than 95% of Texas Instruments’ revenue.
Texas Instruments does not build AI accelerators. It does not compete with NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) on graphics processing units or with Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) on custom ASICs. What it does build is the power-conversion and signal-chain silicon that surrounds every accelerator in a rack.
Why TXN Stock Rocketed This Week
What changed this quarter is where the marginal growth is coming from.
Data center revenue, which did not even merit a separate disclosure line two years ago, grew about 90% year-over-year in the first quarter and more than 25% sequentially. CEO Haviv Ilan said on the earnings call that data center now represents 11% of the company’s business.
Texas Instruments guided second-quarter revenue to a range of $5 billion to $5.4 billion, with the midpoint sitting roughly $350 million above the Street’s expectation.
Earnings per share guidance of $1.77 to $2.05 cleared consensus of $1.58 by a wide margin. First-quarter earnings per share of $1.68 beat the $1.36 consensus by about 23%.
Free cash flow, the metric Texas Instruments management has repeatedly said it manages to, swung to $1.4 billion in the quarter, helped by $555 million in CHIPS Act direct-funding proceeds tied to the Sherman, Texas 300-millimeter fab. On a trailing 12-month basis, free cash flow reached $4.4 billion, up from $1.7 billion a year earlier.
The combination of a cyclical upturn in industrial, an acceleration in data center, and the tail end of a multi-year capacity-investment cycle is what shifted the narrative.
What Wall Street Is Saying About TXN
Seventeen analyst firms revised Texas Instruments coverage following the company’s quarterly results, and every single one raised the price target, as per Benzinga Analyst Ratings.
BofA Securities analyst Vivek Arya upgraded Texas Instruments from Neutral to Buy and lifted his price target from $235 to $320, still implying a notable 15% upside from Thursday’s close.
Arya framed the upgrade around three planks: industrial resurgence, including a $1 billion-plus annual aerospace and defense business, a rising data center mix, and the leverage from three years of US-fab capex in what he called an “everything-is-constrained” chip environment.
Bank of America raised 2026, 2027 and 2028 EPS estimates by 21%, 31% and 33%, respectively.
“TXN’s high quality assets and U.S.-based manufacturing capacity position it well within a constrained chip environment. Now that TXN is past its big capex investment cycle, we expect significant FCF/share growth driven by accelerating sales on industrial and data center power strength,” Arya added.
Another upgrade came from Barclays, which took the stock off Underweight and into Equal-Weight with a price target bumping from $175 to $250.
Rosenblatt’s Kevin Cassidy now holds the Street-high at $330, a $90 lift from $240. Keybanc followed at $325, Evercore ISI at $316, and Benchmark at $315. Goldman Sachs analyst James Schneider remains the lone dissenter, raising his target to $200 from $175 but keeping the Sell rating unchanged — a call that now implies roughly 29% downside from current levels.
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