COVID-19 dominated Intel CEO Bob Swan’s opening statements during the company’s mostly positive first quarter earnings call.

Swan praised Intel employees and supply chain partners for helping the company weather uncertain times. “I want to give a special praise to those in our factories and labs and other off-site personnel who have role modeled the values of our company every day and every shift,” he said.

Swan’s optimism in the face of adversity was largely driven by changing dynamics within the company’s diverse portfolio, which helped Intel beat its previous revenue guidance by more than $800 million.

“Even as COVID-19 drives significant disruptions across the globe, our long-term strategy to deliver the world’s best semiconductors for an increasingly data-centric world is unchanged,” he said.

Intel CFO George Davis touted the company’s Q1 performance which “marked a strong start to the year amidst significant economic uncertainty and the unexpectedly strong demand for PCs and services.”

Intel reported revenues of $19.8 billion for the quarter, up 23% year over year.

While the company’s data center group, which reportedly grew 43% year over year, continued to drive revenues during the quarter, the company also saw its PC business grow by 14% as demand for laptops ballooned under the strain of the pandemic.

Nearly 70% of Intel’s data center revenues were from the company’s cloud and communications service provider businesses, according to Swan. “We scaled our cloud and communications service provider business by 53% and 33% year over year, respectively,” he said.

Elaborating on those revenues, Davis said the group generated $10.1 billion during the first quarter, coming in well above expectations.

What could have been a difficult quarter for Intel was propped up by an acceleration in PC demand as enterprises and schools have pivoted to remote work and learning.

Davis projects this trend will continue through Q2 due to increased telecommuting amid shelter-in-place orders.

Intel anticipates the data center group will continue to drive revenues through the second quarter of 2020.

“We expect the strength in cloud and [communications] infrastructure to continue in Q2, while [the company's IoT group] and Mobileye will see lower demand driven by COVID-19,” said Davis.

However, due to “limited visibility” as a result of the ongoing pandemic and the headwinds the company expects to encounter, Intel did not provide a full-year outlook.

“Headwinds include the impact of a global recession on [IoT] end markets, particularly industrial and retail, lower automotive production impacting Mobileye and slowing enterprise and government data center demand,” Davis said.

The company does expect to see some gains in mobile compute and related infrastructure as a result of the pandemic.

Swan also discussed Intel’s growing place in the emerging artificial intelligence (AI)market during the earnings call.

“We see AI as a significant growth opportunity and we are embedding AI capabilities into everything we make,” he said. “AI has the power to re-imagine how we solve problems across industries including cutting-edge health care diagnostics.”

Perhaps more importantly, the Intel head touched on the company’s acquisition of Habana Labs in December 2019, which he said would strengthen the company’s AI portfolio and "accelerate our efforts in a nascent, fast-growing AI silicon market that we expect will grow to $25 billion by 2024."

The company has largely completed integration efforts with the AI inference and training chipmaker, he added. “We are also now sampling Habana’s first deep learning training processor to larger [communications service providers]."