Rick Wilking/Reuters
- Nvidia on Monday unveiled plans to create and sell its own CPU processors, making it a direct competitor with Intel and AMD.
- Nvidia has historically focused on manufacturing GPU processors, also known as video cards.
- Shares of Nvidia jumped as much as 4% after the news, while Intel and AMD both fell about 4%.
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Nvidia announced plans to manufacture its own CPU processor, transforming the company into a direct competitor of both Intel and AMD.
The news sent shares of Nvidia surging by as much as 4% on Tuesday, while both Intel and AMD fell by about 4%. Nvidia has historically manufactured premium GPU processors, also known as video cards, with its target customer being PC gamers.
But now, Nvidia is expanding its reach with an Arm-based data center CPU named Grace that delivers a big performance leap for systems that are training AI models, according to the announcement. Nvidia acquired Arm Holdings last year for $40 billion, though the deal has not yet closed.
“The result of more than 10,000 engineering years of work, the NVIDIA Grace CPU is designed to address the computing requirements for the world’s most advanced applications, including natural language processing, recommender systems and AI supercomputing,” Nvidia said.
Intel is the world’s largest maker of data center CPUs, but increased competition has spurred the company to make big multi-billion dollar investments into its manufacturing capabilities.
Grace is expected to be launched in 2023 and will be used in the build of new supercomputers from Swiss Supercomputing Center and the US Department of Energy’s Las Alamos National Laboratory.