Nvidia's CPU era has arrived

TL;DR: Remember two months ago when Nvidia announced a CPU? It's already shipping. And, according to its earnings call yesterday, it’s set to make the company $20 billion this year—all because of one thing: agentic AI. Intel and AMD, which have dominated CPUs for decades, predictably aren't rolling out the welcome mat, and even Big Tech is building alternatives. Welcome to the CPU war—we’re just getting started.

What happened: Nvidia posted a record quarterly revenue of $81.6 billion (well above estimates). And on yesterday's call, CEO Jensen Huang declared he had found a “brand-new” market worth $200 billion that Nvidia had “never addressed before.”

“The world is rebuilding computing for agentic AI and robotic physical AI,” Huang said. This is what the Vera CPU chips it announced in March are built for. And, less than two months later, Nvidia VP Ian Buck personally delivered the first Vera systems to Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Oracle. (Watch him show up to Anthropic's office with a server and a screwdriver.)

The CPU bet: As we said in March, agentic AI is the reason CPUs are suddenly so important—agents don't just answer questions; they complete tasks: browsing the web, calling tools, running code. (We have a great explainer video on how all this works.) All of that is CPU work—not GPU, which is how Nvidia built its empire.

With demand for AI agents increasing (it seems they’re about to be in every device ever), Nvidia appears to be placing its bet on CPUs, with reports that it’s working on a laptop CPU that could be unveiled as soon as next month. This could be important for Nvidia moving forward, with Huang saying it has “largely conceded” China's AI chip market to Huawei (a market that once made up around 20% of its data center revenue).

Not so fast: The CPU incumbents are giving Nvidia the side-eye. Intel and AMD have dominated CPUs for decades—and both are already riding the AI demand wave hard. But Nvidia's entry threatens to redirect the fastest-growing slice of that market, and neither is treating it as a speed bump: Intel is tightening its quality standards to sharpen its edge, and AMD is going after Nvidia's AI hardware directly with its new chips. The competition runs even broader: Meta recently signed a deal for Amazon’s homegrown AI CPUs—going around the established chipmakers altogether.

Bottom line: With agentic AI and inference only becoming more important, Nvidia is betting $20 billion is just the beginning of the CPU wars. —SM