NVIDIA Entered CPU War: ARM the Winner, Intel or AMD the Losers?
At Computex, Huang announced Vera CPU entering mass production and RTX Spark crashing into the PC market — NVIDIA is now officially in the CPU business. The market voted with its feet: $ARM Holdings(ARM)$ surged +15.7% to $409, the biggest free-rider winner; $NVIDIA(NVDA)$ +6.3% to $224; while the x86 duo took it on the chin — $Advanced Micro Devices(AMD)$ -1.2% to $510, $Intel(INTC)$ -4.7% to $109. A Barclays report just ranked the winners and losers of this $100B+ CPU war.
For years the semiconductor spotlight was on GPUs. But over the past six months, AI workloads have shifted from training to inference and agents (Agentic AI) — GPUs "compute," CPUs "manage": calling tools, routing sub-agents, tracking task completion. That's CPU work.
The CPU-to-GPU ratio has shifted from ~1:2 to near 1:1 — a completely different standing. Market-size forecasts have doubled in six months: NVIDIA sees a $200B TAM by 2030; AMD pegs the server CPU market at $120B with its own share above 50%.
NVIDIA: the most dangerous new variable
Vera is NVIDIA's first standalone data-center CPU, taking direct aim at Intel Xeon and AMD Epyc. Huang's numbers: 3x faster than x86 on SQL, 6x on data processing, ~1.8x overall on common agent tooling, with Anthropic and OpenAI as early customers. ~$20B of CPU revenue visibility this year.
But there's an opaque variable: nearly all of NVIDIA's CPUs ship bundled inside NVL rack systems — no standalone ASP, and the revenue is "embedded" in rack estimates, not broken out. Which means the market may not have fully priced its CPU footprint yet.
Intel: the most cornered
The target was raised from $65 to $100, but Barclays was blunt: that's ASP-driven valuation repair, not share improvement. The verdict — "ongoing core share loss, structurally pressured profitability, no evidence of a manufacturing-leadership comeback."
The starkest number is the 2030 CPU EPS contribution: AMD ~$19, ARM ~$7, Intel just ~$1.5. x86's efficiency disadvantage on agentic workloads + a lagging process node + getting squeezed by both AMD and NVIDIA = a structural bind no single product cycle fixes.
ARM: does nothing, collects royalties
ARM's logic is the simplest: whoever builds the CPU, if it's on Arm, they pay the royalty. NVIDIA's Vera is Arm; AMD is migrating parts of its line to Arm. Barclays lifted the target from $250 to $360, with ~$7 of 2030 CPU EPS contribution. It never steps onto the battlefield to fight for share — the most stable way to benefit, and why it spiked 15% in a single day.
Whose side are you on in the CPU war?
Is the market simply rewarding the certainty of "royalty collection"?
Can Huang's Vera really take share from x86, or is it just an add-on bundled into NVL racks?
Intel's target was lifted to $100, but it's only valuation repair — do you think it has a comeback left in this cycle?
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2. Yes $ARM Holdings(ARM)$ has a high valuation due to the value of royalties of the arm chipset instruction set
3. Yes, $NVIDIA(NVDA)$ new cpu has higher performance that legacy x86 cpu chipsets
4. $Intel(INTC)$ is highly valued for its current position in the market which is second to amd and nvda
NVIDIA is still the biggest wildcard. Vera may not replace x86 overnight, but within NVIDIA’s AI ecosystem it doesn’t need to. If customers are already buying NVL racks, adopting Vera becomes a natural extension. The market may also be underestimating how much CPU revenue is embedded inside those systems.
For Intel, I’m not convinced a comeback is near. A higher target driven by valuation repair is different from improving competitiveness. Intel still faces pressure from AMD and NVIDIA, and until I see clear market-share gains and product leadership, I remain cautious.
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