Riding on the back of record data center revenues, Intel exceeded expectations in the fourth quarter of 2019. The chipmaker reported $20.2 billion in revenue for the quarter, which exceeded guidance by $1 billion.

"We exceeded our expectations for Q4 2019 capping off a fourth consecutive record year," said Intel CEO Bob Swan during Wednesday's earnings call, according to a transcript.

Swan credited much of the record quarter to Intel's booming Data Center Group (DCG), which he said accounted for more than 50% of revenues in the quarter.

"DCG revenue was $10 billion in the fourth quarter, up 2% year-over-year driven by higher PC and modem volumes," added Intel CFO George Davis.

The chipmaker projects that its data center segment will continue to grow throughout 2020. "We expect revenue from our data-centric businesses to be up [in the] high, single digits for the full year," Davis said.

However, Davis added that the company is projecting front-loaded revenues in the first half of 2020, with data center revenues growing as much as 25% year over year on the back of strong cloud build-outs and NAND flash memory growth.

Swan said in addition to strengthening its core business, Intel will be making large investments in key data-driven fields going into 2020. These fields include artificial intelligence (AI), network transformation, and intelligent and autonomous edge.

"The market for AI-based silicon is growing and evolving quick," said Swan. "New workloads are emerging and existing workloads like high-performance computing are converging with AI."

The quarter capped off a competitive year for Intel that has seen an influx of competition across its product lines from the likes of AMD. Looking forward to 2020, the company expects some headwinds as rival chipmakers continue to encroach.

Despite this competition, Intel reported full-year revenues of $72 billion lead by PC, data center, IoT, memory, and the company's Mobileye business divisions.

Reassuring investors, Swan admitted that the environment has become much more competitive while at the same time talking up the robust demand for its products from cloud providers — a segment that is quickly becoming a dominant source of revenues within the Data Center Group. "Our intentions for the course of the year is to compete vigorously to protect our position while continuing to expand as compute moves further and further away from the cloud out to the network and to the edge," he said.

Davis, meanwhile, touted Intel's record growth and expressed his confidence in the company's ability to maintain this trajectory. "2019 was intel's best year ever, and we expect a strong start to 2020 on the way to another record year," he said.