Nvidia may have made its immense fortune on the back of specialized graphics processing units (GPUs) used to power artificial intelligence servers, but CEO Jensen Huang is increasingly professing his love for the more generalist CPU. The CPU, or central processing unit, was for decades traditionally viewed as the main brain of a computer – a product most associated with Intel or sometimes Advanced Micro Devices.
Huang is fond of saying that where once 90% of computing used to happen on CPUs and 10% on chips like his, the ratio had flipped in recent years. But the CPU is now making a comeback – increasingly seen as an equivalent if not better option as AI companies shift from training their models to deploying them – a shift that Nvidia plans to be a big part of. “We love CPUs as well as GPUs,” Huang said on a call with analysts on Wednesday for the company’s fourth-quarter results.
He assured them that Nvidia was not only ready for the CPU’s return to the spotlight, but also that Nvidia’s own CPU offerings for data centers, first released in 2023, would outcompete rivals. Last month, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Huang also said the number of high-performance Nvidia CPUs being used in data centers would explode and that he wouldn’t be surprised “if Nvidia becomes one of the largest CPU makers in the world.”
