DALLAS — Texas Instruments Inc. shares skyrocketed more than 18% Thursday after the analog chip giant crushed Wall Street expectations for the first quarter and issued upbeat guidance fueled by surging demand from data centers and industrial customers.

The stock (NASDAQ: TXN) opened at $260.76 and climbed as high as $281.11 in morning trading on April 23, up about $44 from Wednesday’s close of $236.31. Volume surged well above average as investors cheered the strongest quarterly report in years from the Dallas-based semiconductor leader.

Texas Instruments reported first-quarter revenue of $4.83 billion, a 19% jump from the year-ago period and well above analysts’ consensus estimate of around $4.53 billion. Earnings per share came in at $1.68, smashing estimates of $1.36 and marking a 31% increase year-over-year.

“Our results reflect broad-based strength across our markets, particularly in industrial and enterprise systems,” said Haviv Ilan, chairman, president and CEO, in prepared remarks. The company highlighted robust performance in its core Analog segment, which generated $3.92 billion in revenue, up 22% year-over-year.

The Embedded Processing segment also contributed, posting $723 million in revenue, up 12%. Operating profit rose 37% to $1.81 billion, underscoring improved margins amid recovering demand.

Investors appeared particularly encouraged by the company’s forward-looking outlook. Texas Instruments guided for second-quarter revenue between $5.00 billion and $5.40 billion, with a midpoint of $5.20 billion that tops consensus forecasts. EPS guidance of $1.77 to $2.05 also exceeded expectations.

Analysts quickly responded with a wave of upgrades and price target hikes. Bank of America upgraded the stock to Buy from Neutral and raised its target to $320 from $235. Other firms including Baird, Rosenblatt, KeyBanc, Jefferies and Barclays followed suit with significant increases, pushing average targets well above $250.

“This is more than just data-center tailwinds,” one analyst noted. While AI-driven server demand helped, strength in industrial applications and steady automotive recovery played key roles. TI did not cite rising prices as a major factor but signaled potential increases later in the year.

The results come as the broader semiconductor industry navigates a recovery phase. Texas Instruments, long known for its focus on analog chips used in everything from industrial equipment to cars and consumer electronics, has benefited from diversification away from the more volatile personal electronics segment.

Founded in 1930, Texas Instruments remains a cornerstone of American semiconductor manufacturing. The company has aggressively expanded its internal production capacity, supported in part by CHIPS Act incentives. Trailing 12-month free cash flow reached $4.35 billion, up 154% year-over-year.

Shareholder returns remain robust. The board recently declared a quarterly dividend of $1.42 per share, payable in May. Over the past year, TI has returned more than $6 billion to shareholders through dividends and buybacks.

Wall Street’s reaction reflected relief after months of cautious sentiment around cyclical recovery in chips. TI shares had already climbed more than 60% year-to-date entering the report, but Thursday’s move pushed the stock to fresh all-time highs and underscored confidence in sustained growth.

Industry observers point to several tailwinds. Data center buildouts for AI training and inference continue at a rapid pace, boosting demand for power management and signal chain products where TI holds leading positions. Industrial automation, factory upgrades and electrification trends provide additional support.

Challenges remain. The company has faced headwinds in personal electronics and certain automotive segments tied to China. However, management expressed optimism about inventory normalization and broader market recovery. Capital expenditures are expected to moderate slightly, signaling confidence in existing capacity.

Analysts now forecast full-year growth in the mid-to-high teens, with potential for further upside if industrial markets accelerate. Consensus price targets have risen sharply post-earnings, though some caution that valuation — with a forward P/E around 36-40 — leaves limited room for error.

Texas Instruments’ performance stands in contrast to more AI-centric names that have dominated headlines. Its steady, diversified portfolio has historically provided resilience through cycles, a trait investors rewarded handsomely on Thursday.

Looking ahead, the company will host its annual meeting and continue investing in advanced manufacturing. The pending acquisition of Silicon Labs, announced earlier, aims to bolster its position in embedded wireless connectivity, further diversifying its portfolio.

Market reaction extended beyond TI. Peers in the analog and industrial chip space saw gains, while the broader Nasdaq and semiconductor index traded mixed amid rotation and profit-taking elsewhere.

For investors, Thursday’s surge highlights the power of earnings beats in a market hungry for growth stories grounded in real demand rather than hype. Texas Instruments has delivered eight consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth, positioning it well for what many expect to be a multi-year upcycle in semiconductors.

Company executives struck a balanced tone on the earnings call, acknowledging macro uncertainties but emphasizing execution and long-term structural opportunities in electrification, automation and AI infrastructure. Gross margin stood at approximately 58%, reflecting operational efficiency.

As trading continued Thursday morning, shares consolidated some gains but remained up sharply. The move caps a remarkable run for a stock once viewed as defensive and slow-growing. With data centers and industrial markets firing on multiple cylinders, Texas Instruments appears to have caught the AI wave without abandoning its traditional strengths.

94 properties proposed for 1.03 hectacre Stretford site

Plans to build nearly 100 houses and flats on a site once home to an RAC call centre have been unveiled.

The scheme would see 94 properties built across the 1.03 hectacre Stretford site. They would be a mix of houses and flats, planning documents reveal. All the homes would be classed as ‘affordable’.

The land, off Thomas Street, formed part of the old Stretford Gasworks. After the gasworks closed in the 1960s, it was redeveloped into the Longford Trading Estate.

Plans to create the call centre there were approved in 2000. However, the RAC eventually vacated the land, citing difficulties attracting and retaining staff at the Stretford location as a key reason, according to planning documents. The company relocated its offices to Salford Quays.

The land has stood empty since the building on it was demolished in 2024. Now, developers MCI Developments and JS Hennessey (1999) RBS have put forward plans to bring much of it back into use.

Pre-application discussions with Trafford council considered a much larger scheme. Under those plans, 192 homes would have been built over a 3.4h of land, including additional land to the northwest which the National Grid previously used as a gas holder and depot site.

Council officials raised concerns over the loss of so much employment land, however, and the proposal was scaled back to its current size. The developers said this would allow more employment space to be retained and the site to ‘continue to make an economic contribution’.

They added the ‘cost of remediation’ for the western parcel of land would have ‘rendered the site unviable for residential uses’. The companies consider the delivery of affordable housing sufficient to ‘outweigh’ any ‘adverse impacts’ from the loss of the remaining employment space.

The scheme would see 46 houses and 48 apartments built. These would range from one- and two-bed flats to three- and four-bed town houses. The apartment buildings would be four storeys in height.

Some 94 parking spaces are proposed for residents, with an additional 25 for parking.

Three communal green spaces are also planned. These include a landscaped open space at the edge of the canal, and a space at the centre of the development with ‘rain gardens’ and ‘ornamental tree planting’.

To find all the planning applications, traffic diversions, road layout changes, alcohol licence applications and more in your community, visit the Public Notices Portal.

PORTHCURNO (ENGLAND): Newly discovered documents have revealed the first telegraph messages and joy when England was linked for the first time with India on 23 June, 1870, via thousands of km of cables laid painstakingly below the seas, reducing time from months to minutes.

The sylvan Porthcurno valley in Cornwall, located on the Atlantic coast 506 km south-west of London, was the unlikely place of a revolution that enabled Britain and its former colonies to communicate with each other.

Museum officials told a visiting PTI correspondent that Porthcurno was the hub of international cable communications from 1870 to 1970, and a training college for the communications industry until 1993.

Now a museum housing rare equipment and details of the history of telegraph, Porthcurno has been granted millions of pounds in funding to develop an international education programme that includes community groups in India.

Among its rare archives discovered last week is a collection of the first telegraph messages sent from Porthcurno and Mumbai (then Bombay).

Until that landmark day, communication between England and India was unreliable, and often took months.
According to the document, the first message was dispatched on the night of 23 June, 1870, and a reply was received in 5 minutes, which was a technological feat at the time.The message was called a ‘complimentary telegram’ between the ‘Managing Director in London and the Manager in Bombay’.

The first message was from ‘Anderson to Stacey: How are you all?’, to which the reply was: ‘All well’.

The second message from Anderson was: ‘Please ask gentlemen of the press, Bombay, to send a message to gentlemen of the press, New York’.

After several messages that night, including some to the governor of Bombay, from Lady Mayo to viceroy Lord Mayo based in Shimla, and one from the Prince of Wales to the viceroy, a response was received from journalists based in Bombay.

It said: ‘From the Press of India to the Press of America: The Press of India sends salaam to the Press of America. Reply quick’.

The document notes that the viceroy of India had sent a telegraph to the president of the United States and “received a reply which reached him in 7 hours 40 minutes”.

The viceroy’s message, which was read in the American Congress the same evening, was: “The Viceroy of India for the first time speaks direct by telegraph with the President of the United States. May the completion of the long line of uninterrupted communication be the emblem of lasting union between the Eastern and Western World”.

Telegraphic communication with India was first established in 1864 by overland telegraph lines from Europe to the top of the Persian Gulf and then by an undersea cable to Karachi, but the overland section was never satisfactory, prompting efforts to lay more reliable cables below the sea.

In 1869, telegraph pioneer John Pender established the British Indian Submarine Telegraph Company, whose task was to lay undersea cables to India.

The five ships used to lay the thousands of km of cables were the Great Eastern, William Cory, Chiltern, Hawk and Hibernia.

It took six weeks to lay the cables from Suez to Bombay. This was followed by the laying of the final link from Malta to Porthcurno.

It was the first long distance cable ‘chain’, and opened to the public with much jubilation, museum records show.

After the link with India was established, Porthcurno was linked by undersea cables to several other areas across the world.

At its height, it was the world’s largest station with 14 cables in operation. Porthcurno’s telegraphic codename was ‘PK’.

During World War II, tunnels were dug by Cornish miners to house an underground building and Porthcurno’s entire telegraph operations.
The building today houses the museum and archives that started the communication revolution in the late nineteenth century.
Besides 1.44 million pounds funding received in January, the museum this week has been granted 35,000 pounds from the international telecommunications organisation SubOptic to develop an education project with community groups in India, among other countries.
Museum officials said the money will fund an international education programme that will benefit users from spring 2013.

It will include online learning resources, including video clips, animations and games that will enable users to discover the science of global cable-based telecommunications, as well as its impacts on local identity, democracy and culture.

This article was written by

PUNE: The statistical models used by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) had failed to predict all the three droughts in India in the last decade. Though statistical models will still be used for monsoon forecast, the ministry of earth sciences is putting more emphasis on dynamic models.

M Rajeevan of National Atmospheric Research Laboratory said, “the failure to predict the 2009 drought has raised many serious issues. On the other hand, the state-of-the art coupled ocean atmospheric models have sho-wed improved skills in predicting inter annual variability of Indian summer monsoon rainfall.”

He was speaking at the golden jubilee conference of Indian Institute of Climate Change (IITM), Pune, on ‘opportunities and challenges in monsoon prediction in changing climate’. Since 2011, the IITM has used the coupled model for monsoon forecast.
Better weather forecast needs data from all parts of the globe. “In every part of the world, farmers are saying that the climate is not as it used to be. Hence, traditional knowledge is also failing. For better prediction of weather, we need observations from all countries. We need super computers of even higher capacities. We need to have knowledge about how to translate scientific progress into concrete applications,” said Michel Jarraud, secretary general, World Meteorological Organisation.