Nvidia’s astronomical rise to the world’s most valuable public company. was propelled by its graphics processing units (GPUs). Now, as A.I. enters its agentic phase, CEO Jensen Huang is betting future growth on central processing units (CPUs), long a secondary focus for the company.
“The world has 1 billion human users. My sense is that the world is going to have billions of agents. We’re going to need a lot more CPUs,” Huang told analysts on Nvidia’s latest quarterly earnings call yesterday (May 20).
GPUs are great at the parallel processing required for A.I. workloads, while CPUs excel at processing tokens quickly—a key requirement for agentic systems. Nvidia has already generated $20 billion in CPU revenue this year, according to CFO Colette Kress, who told analysts these results are “setting us up to become the world’s leading CPU supplier.”
A key piece of that push is Vera, Nvidia’s newest CPU unveiled in March. Huang described it as a “major new growth driver,” adding that the chips open up a “market we have never addressed before.” He estimates the CPU market opportunity to be worth $200 billion.
For now, Nvidia’s bottom line continues to be driven by GPUs. For the February–April quarter, the company reported $81.6 billion in revenue, up 85 percent year-over-year, and a 211 percent jump in net income to $58.3 billion, beating Wall Street expectations. Data center revenue, which includes A.I. chips, reached $75 billion, up 92 percent from a year earlier.
Huang has made a career out of anticipating industry shifts. When he founded Nvidia in 1993, it was a gaming-focused company. He later pivoted toward A.I. as GPUs proved well-suited for the technology, positioning Nvidia at the center of the current boom. More recently, the company has expanded into emerging areas like “physical A.I.”, including autonomous vehicles and robotics.
The CPU market, however, presents a different challenge. Rivals have already been gaining ground as demand for these chips rises alongside agentic A.I. workloads. Intel’s stock has climbed 193 percent since January, while AMD is up 97 percent over the same period.
Both companies are leaning into the shift. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan called CPUs the “indispensable foundation of the A.I. era,” adding that the trend is “not just our wishful thinking, it’s what we hear from customers.” The company reported $13.6 billion in quarterly revenue last month, up 7 percent year-over-year. AMD is seeing similar momentum, with revenue rising 38 percent to $10.3 billion; CEO Lisa Su told analysts she expects CPU revenue to grow 70 percent this quarter.
Still, analysts see opportunity for Nvidia. Its Vera chips are “adding a dimension to growth with the CPU market,” said Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold. “While we are not certain that the ratio of CPUs to accelerators will go to 1:1, we accept the CPU growth is faster and the ratio is narrowing, and this is favorable for Nvidia.”
