Nvidia on track to be worlds leading CPU supplier claims CFO

Already the planet's largest supplier of GPUs, Nvidia now intends to conquer the CPU market. We have visibility to nearly $20 billion in total CPU revenue this year, setting us up to become the world's leading CPU supplier," Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said during the company's Q1 2027 earnings call on Wednesday. Nvidia is no stranger to CPUs having announced its first Arm datacenter chip, codenamed Grace, back in 2021. However until recently the company integrated most of these parts into GPU systems that users almost always deployed in AI datacenters and supercomputers. That changed in February when Nvidia revealed Meta was among the first hyperscalers now deploying standalone Grace CPU Superchips in its datacenters to power a variety of workloads including the Social Network's AI agents. At its GTC conference in March, Nvidia officially expanded its CPU line up to include a standalone Vera CPU system. Each chip features 88 custom Olympus Arm cores with support for simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) - that's Hyperthreading in Intel speak - along with confidential computing capabilities. Nvidia can equi[ each chip with up to 1.5 TB of LPDDR5x SOCAMM memory, which offers higher memory bandwidth at up to 1.2 TB/s and uses little power (which is why it's often used in laptops). Vera will deliver up to 1.5x faster performance per core, 2x performance per watt, and 4x density per rack compared to x86-based alternatives," Kress claimed. Nvidia's reference designs pack up to two Vera CPUs onto a single board and via high-speed NVLink interconnects. Nvidia's Vera is also paired in a 2:1 ratio of Rubin GPUs to CPUs in its most powerful rack-scale AI compute platforms. Since the chip was detailed this spring, Kress claims nearly every major hyperscaler and system builder plans to deploy the chips. This week, several top AI labs and hyperscalers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Oracle, and SpaceX took delivery of Nvidia's first Vera-based systems. Vera CPU opens a brand new $200 billion TAM for Nvidia, a market we have never addressed before," she said. While Nvidia is expanding its addressable market to include standalone CPUs, it should be noted that much like the company's Ethernet networking products, they're designed primarily with AI and HPC applications in mind. The chips can't replace x86 processors in every application, yet. Kress' comments come as Nvidia caps off a strong end to the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year. The GPU giant raked in $58.3 billion in profits on $81.6 billion in revenue for the quarter, the latter of which grew 85 percent YoY and 20 percent from the prior quarter. Kress attributed the sequential jump to an inflection in inference demand." The quarter saw Nvidia change how it breaks out revenues. The company's business units have now been organized into a datacenter group which includes cloud, hyperscale, neocloud and enterprise sales, plus an edge group, which serves as a catchall for gaming, robotics, automotive, and vRAN products. Datacenter revenues accounted for the vast majority of revenues, at $75.2 billion. Of that $38 billion came from hyperscaler and public cloud customers, while neocloud, industrial, and enterprise customers paid the remaining $37 billion. Edge sales accounted for a mere $6.4 billion, with the company citing demand for Blackwell-based workstation gear as a key driver. Looking ahead to Q2, Nvidia forecast revenue will hit $91 billion plus or minus two percent. That prediction assumed no datacenter sales in China. Nvidia has been trying for months to reignite its GPU business in the Middle Kingdom since Uncle Sam gave the company the green light to sell its aging H200 processors to Chinese customers for the first time ever back in December. Despite receiving approval from the Trump administration and receiving billions of dollars worth of orders, shipments remain stuck in Beijing's red tape. (R)