US computer chip giant Intel has posted its best earnings ever in 2010 as businesses beefed up data centres to handle services increasingly shifting to the internet “cloud.”

Intel said it took in a net profit of $11.7 billion for the year on revenue of $43.6 billion, a 167 per cent jump from the profit it posted in 2009.

“2010 was the best year in Intel’s history,” the California-based company’s chief executive officer Paul Otellini said in comments released with the earnings report. “We believe that 2011 will be even better.”

Intel’s net profit for the final quarter was $3.4 billion, a 48 per cent increase from the same quarter a year earlier.

Intel’s stock price climbed more than two per cent to $21.75 a share shortly after the release of the earnings results.

Executives said that Intel’s business was being driven by emerging markets such as China, the consumer side of the market, and “the build out of the cloud” to add muscle to data centers to handle online services and software.

“The stand-out was the data centre group,” Mr Otellini said of the company’s performance. “Intel is positioned to benefit from the growth of the data centre and cloud computing.” Intel projected revenue of $11.5 billion for the current quarter and said that it expected to spend nearly $14 billion this year on researching and developing products and acquisitions or mergers.

Intel on Monday announced it would pay graphics card developer NVIDIA $1.5 billion over the next five years to settle a patent dispute.

The companies have been arguing for nearly two years about whether a deal they inked allows NVIDIA to produce chipsets that work with Intel microprocessors.