Nvidia CEO signals CPU push against Intel, AMD

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on a quarterly earnings call that the company “loves CPUs as well as GPUs,” signaling increased emphasis on CPUs after years of GPU-led growth, Reuters reported.

Huang said that Nvidia’s data center CPUs, introduced in 2023, are designed to outcompete rivals and that adoption is expected to grow.

The company recently announced a deal with Meta Platforms to supply its Grace and Vera CPUs for standalone use.

Reuters noted Meta is expanding suppliers rather than switching vendors; AMD also announced a large CPU deal with Meta days later.

Historically, CPUs have been associated with Intel and AMD, but Nvidia’s approach focuses on high data processing capabilities for AI workloads.

Industry analysts, including Dave Altavilla, say Nvidia aims to challenge the assumption that Intel’s CPUs are the default foundation of modern compute infrastructure.

More details on Nvidia’s CPU plans are expected at the company’s developer conference in Silicon Valley next month.

🔗 Source: Reuters

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

The new CPU demand is being linked to agentic AI workloads

Meta Platforms is deploying Nvidia’s CPUs in some data center systems without Nvidia GPUs, for workloads that do not need a GPU 1.
Those jobs include “agentic AI,” where AI agents carry out multi-step work such as writing code, debugging it, and browsing the web. These workloads often lean more on CPUs than many GPU-centered AI tasks 2, 3.
That shift is tightening a new choke point in AI data centers. CPUs are moving from a supporting role to a more central layer of compute 4.
Meta and Nvidia say Nvidia’s Grace CPU can deliver up to 2x performance per watt on certain backend data center workloads at Meta 5.

Nvidia is positioning the CPU battle as a platform war

The company frames the moment as a possible “CPU supercycle” driven by agentic AI that could grow the wider server CPU market. The cited sources here do not back the claim that both AMD and Intel are forecasting strong growth 2.
Nvidia is pushing more than standalone chips. It is selling a full bundle that includes CPUs, GPUs, and networking gear such as Spectrum-X 6.
That package forces competitors to take on Nvidia’s combined hardware and networking stack, rather than a single part 2.
Meta’s large-scale rollout of Nvidia’s Arm-based Grace CPUs goes against the broader move toward hyperscaler-built Arm CPUs such as AWS Graviton or Google Axion. Meta is also building some of its own chips and still buys from other suppliers 1.