NVIDIA announced its first self-developed CPU, 'Vera,' which is expected to generate $20 billion in revenue this year. Analysts note that although this figure may include the value of system integration and associated memory, its scale is still sufficient to challenge the dominance of Intel and AMD.
$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$After dominating the AI chip market with GPUs, it is now setting its sights on a new domain it has never previously entered—the CPU market.
During the company's earnings call this Wednesday, NVIDIA Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress stated that Vera, the company’s first standalone CPU product designed for artificial intelligence, has opened up a “new” potential market worth as much as $200 billion. She added that NVIDIA already has nearly $20 billion in revenue visibility from its CPU business this year and that Vera is “propelling us to become the world’s leading CPU supplier.”
This statement quickly drew attention from Wall Street. Several analysts noted that if the anticipated $20 billion in revenue materializes, NVIDIA would immediately become a leading player in the CPU market and surpass Advanced Micro Devices in cloud CPU revenue. At the same time, this move would extend NVIDIA’s reach into a market long dominated by$Intel (INTC.US)$、$Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.US)$and$Arm Holdings (ARM.US)$a long-dominant player.
For competitors such as Arm and Qualcomm, which rely on independent CPU architectures, NVIDIA’s entry could squeeze already tight manufacturing capacity and deliver a tangible competitive impact.
Vera Opens Up a $200 Billion New Market
Vera, officially launched in March this year, is$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$the company’s first-ever standalone CPU product, specifically designed for AI inference and agentic workloads and built on the Arm architecture. During the earnings call, Kress stated that hyperscale cloud providers and AI system manufacturers have already begun deploying this chip, noting that CPUs represent a market segment NVIDIA had 'never previously entered.'
According to Kress, NVIDIA already has nearly $20 billion in revenue visibility from its CPU business this year. If realized, this figure would exceed UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri’s forecast of approximately $16 billion in CPU revenue for AMD this year— despite AMD currently holding over 50% market share in cloud CPUs.
In a research note published Thursday, Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon wrote that NVIDIA “appears poised to become the dominant player in the CPU space, with a business scale that could match or even surpass that of more traditional competitors in this market.”
Wall Street: The $20 Billion Figure Requires Context
Analysts broadly agree that the $20 billion figure carries some interpretive flexibility and should not be directly compared against traditional CPU revenue metrics.
Arcuri noted that Vera can either be used as a standalone chip paired with non-NVIDIA AI chips or sold as part of an integrated system solution that includes CPUs and memory components. Because expensive memory chips are also included in the latter bundled offering, the projected $20 billion figure is 'not as straightforward as it appears.' He estimates that Vera accounts for approximately 30% of the total system value and has set his forecast for NVIDIA’s actual CPU revenue this year in the range of $5 billion to $7 billion.
Rasgon, meanwhile, suggested that the high $20 billion figure may stem from NVIDIA pricing its CPUs by the rack rather than per individual chip. Joseph Moore, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, shares a similar view, describing the figure as 'likely including CPUs delivered alongside GPU cards—a metric that counts but is relatively easy to achieve.' Nevertheless, Moore stated that reaching the $20 billion target would place NVIDIA 'at the tipping point of market leadership,' though his revenue model for Intel’s data center business (including certain networking products) remains slightly higher than that of NVIDIA.
Resurgent Inference Wave Reignites Demand for CPUs
$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$NVIDIA’s entry into the CPU market comes at a time when AI applications are rapidly shifting from model training to inference and agentic AI paradigms. Unlike the training phase, which heavily relies on GPUs, the inference phase has significantly renewed demand for server CPUs.
This trend has already sparked signs of recovery for Intel, which had previously been struggling,$Arm Holdings (ARM.US)$and earlier this year announced the launch of its first-ever in-house designed CPU chip, specifically tailored for inference and agentic AI workloads.
Moore stated that$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$the Arm-based CPUs NVIDIA is introducing compete along different dimensions than Intel’s x86 CPUs and would 'not impose any additional negative impact' on x86-based chips.
Beyond NVIDIA, Arcuri warned that NVIDIA’s aggressive move into the CPU space would further strain already tight wafer and memory capacity, 'negatively impacting' market expansion efforts by companies such as Arm and Qualcomm.
Arcuri specifically pointed out that Arm’s relationships with wafer foundries and memory suppliers are comparatively less mature than NVIDIA’s, making it potentially more directly affected. Moore, however, argued that NVIDIA’s years of accumulated supply chain bargaining power and procurement priority would enable it to maintain strong competitiveness even in a capacity-constrained environment.
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