How NXP Semiconductors Stock Soared 49% Last Month

Key Points

NXP beat analyst estimates on both revenue and earnings in the first quarter.

Management's Q2 revenue guidance came in well above Wall Street expectations.

NXP focuses on power, cooling, and security rather than competing with GPU makers.

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Shares of NXP Semiconductors (NASDAQ: NXPI) rose 49.1% in April 2026, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. The Dutch-American chipmaker beat Wall Street's estimates in last week's first-quarter report. According to management's guidance targets, its revenue growth is accelerating. That's a powerful combo, and the report sent NXP's stock soaring.

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The numbers behind the 49% surge

Let's start with the basic numbers.

NXP's sales rose 12% year over year to $3.18 billion. Your average analyst had expected $3.15 billion. On the bottom line, adjusted earnings jumped from $2.64 to $3.05 per share. Here, the Street would have settled for $2.98 per share.

Looking ahead, management set the midpoint of their Q2 guidance range at $3.45 billion, well ahead of the analyst consensus of $3.27 billion.

During the first quarter, NXP unveiled new products and services across healthcare, vehicle automation, and industrial computing. The new eIQ agentic AI framework helps customers set up secure edge computing functions and services. A robotics platform first shown in March was developed in partnership with AI giant Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA).

Thanks to this broad range of AI initiatives, NXP's management expects data center revenues to more than double in 2026. A move from $200 million to $500 million per year may seem small in the context of multibillion-dollar total revenues per quarter, but the growth story has to start somewhere.

In the automotive industry, the company is looking for more chip wins per car, rather than a larger portfolio of customers in this sector. That's a benefit in an era of flattish vehicle unit shipments.

In other words, NXP is getting busy in the core target markets of automotive and industrial computing. The company is growing faster than expected, playing an active role in the ongoing AI boom.

The stock rose 26.6% the next day, trading at fresh all-time highs. Thanks to robust business growth, NXP shares still look quite affordable at 27.8 times trailing earnings and a price/earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratio of 0.82. As a reminder, PEG ratios below 1 suggest that the stock may be undervalued in the context of its earnings growth prospects.

A leaner, meaner chipmaker emerges

Amid these soaring financials, NXP is moving its manufacturing operations to a less capital-intensive model. Older chipmaking facilities are being upgraded to more modern equipment that can handle larger silicon wafers. At the same time, the company is selling a handful of less profitable facilities and outsourcing more work to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE: TSM).

And the company approaches the AI data center opportunity from a different angle than Nvidia and others.

"We are not claiming exposure to the data plane -- no GPUs, no accelerators, no high-speed AI connectivity," CEO Rafael Sotomayor said on the earnings call. "Our domain is in the control plane. As data centers scale, the constraints are not just compute and memory; they are also power, cooling, uptime, and security, and this is where NXP Semiconductors plays."

So NXP's products make modern data centers run cooler and more efficiently, saving electric power and other assets around the headline-writing AI accelerator systems. That's a fantastic growth market, too. If you haven't considered NXP stock before, you should take a look before the AI sales really take off.

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Anders Bylund has positions in NXP Semiconductors and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends NXP Semiconductors, Nvidia, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.