• 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 ...
