Intel Corp. recovered a bit today from a black eye administered by a recently discovered chip flaw, reporting better-than-expected earnings for its fourth quarter thanks to strong growth in its data center chip business.

The chipmaking giant also forecast revenue in the current quarter that matched analysts’ expectations. It even issued a new forecast for earnings per share this year that beat predictions, though most all of that upside appears to come from benefits from the recently passed U.S. tax act.

The company credited strong results in newer areas beyond chips for personal computers, where it owns around 90 percent of the market, meaning limited opportunity to grow. Intel Chief Executive Brian Krzanich said investments in memory and programmable chips, communications and autonomous driving are starting to pay off in providing more markets.

Intel’s problems with vulnerabilities in its chips, which came to light at the start of the new year, didn’t have an impact on the quarter, and Intel has said it doesn’t expect them to going forward either. But analysts and investors have worried they might have an impact on coming quarters if customers slowed purchases awaiting fixes or new chips. And in its press release, it did include a warning that security flaws “could adversely impact our results.”

Intel’s forecast seemed to ease those concerns, at least for now. Still, Krzanich addressed the security concerns at the top of the earnings conference call. “I’m acutely aware that we have more to do,” he said. The near-term focus is “high-quality mitigation” to prevent problems in current chips while working on silicon-based fixes in new chips due out later this year. “This will be an ongoing journey,” he said.

Specifically, the company said it expects first-quarter revenue of about $15 billion, give or take a half-billion, and a profit per share before certain costs involved in restructuring and acquisitions of 70 cents, give or take 5 cents. That’s a little ahead of the 72-cent consensus. For the full year, it’s reckoning a $3.55-per-share profit on revenue of $65 billion.

For the fourth quarter, Intel earned an adjusted profit of $1.08 cents a share, well above analysts’ forecast of 86 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters, and up from 79 cents a year ago. Revenue rose 8 percent not counting its McAfee security unit spun out last April (4 percent including it), to $17.1 billion, also comfortably above analysts’ estimate of $16.34 billion. For the year, Intel earned an adjusted profit of $3.46 a share on $62.8 billion in revenue.

Investors liked the news, as Intel’s shares rose more than 4 percent in after-hours trading. Its stock, under pressure thanks to fallout from the chip flaw, fell a little under a half-percentage point, to $45.30, in regular trading today.

Intel’s Client Computing Group, which accounts for more than half of revenue, has been gradually declining as personal computers continue their long decline. In the fourth quarter, revenue fell 2 percent, to nearly $9 billion.

The Data Center Group, which sells chips and systems for enterprise computer server centers, saw revenue jump almost 20 percent, to $5.6 billion — double what analysts expected. The group had hit a slower patch recently, but it’s seen as a big potential contributor to make up for declining sales of PC chips, so the recovery is welcome news to investors.

The other three groups — covering the “internet of things,” nonvolatile memory chips and programmable chips, each generated less than $1 billion apiece, but they’re growing 21 percent, 9 percent and 35 percent, respectively.

“Intel had a banner quarter on many dimensions,” said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “DCG saw a big 20 percent improvement based on public cloud, which added to improvements in memory, field-programmable gate arrays and IoT. The only area of weakness was PCs, which I believe was impacted by a down market and competitive pressures.”

Intel has been under fire lately on a number of fronts. Most recently, its processors, as well as those of other companies such as Advanced Micro Devices Inc., going back many years were found to be potentially vulnerable to an attack. The bugs, called “Meltdown” and “Spectre,” could allow hackers to seize control of various software applications. But after performance problems with patches it issued, Intel was forced to recommend holding off on installing them for now.

The company also faces rising competitive pressures, in particular for chips used to do artificial intelligence. Nvidia Corp.’s graphics processing unit chips have become a standard for running machine learning algorithms that underlie big advances in speech and image recognition in recent years as well as coming technologies such as self-driving cars.

Intel did get something of a win on the competitive front Wednesday, however. The European Union fined Qualcomm Technologies Inc. more than $1.2 billion for allegedly violating antitrust laws through the use of multibillion-dollar payments to Apple Inc. to ensure its exclusive use of Qualcomm mobile chips.

The U.S. tax bill also played a role in fourth-quarter results, as Intel took a $5.4 billion income tax expense that included a one-time “transition tax” from repatriating overseas earnings. Chief Financial Officer Bob Swan said the new, lower corporate tax rate will be “further incentive” to continue investments in research and development and manufacturing.

He also said it prompted a 10 percent hike in its dividend announced today. However, the onetime tax hit resulted in a fourth-quarter net loss of $687 million.

Photo: Robert Hof