Nvidia has taken a roughly 4 percent stake in Intel, investing 5 billion dollars and forming a strategic alliance to co-develop next-generation data center and PC chips. It’s unclear whether the collaboration will (eventually) include manufacturing at Intel’s foundry business, but it does mark a deeper integration of Nvidia’s AI and GPU platforms with Intel’s x86 CPU and packaging technologies.
“This historic collaboration tightly couples Nvidia’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem – a fusion of two world-class platforms. Together, we’ll expand our ecosystems and lay the foundation for the next era of computing,” says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “Intel’s leading data center and client computing platforms, combined with our process technology, manufacturing and advanced packaging capabilities, will complement Nvidia’s AI and accelerated computing leadership to enable new breakthroughs for the industry,” adds Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
The pact covers multiple product generations. In data centers, Intel will design custom CPUs for Nvidia’s AI platforms, linked via proprietary high-speed NVLink interconnects. For PCs, Intel will integrate Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets into x86 SOCs. These high-speed links are crucial for scaling AI workloads, and the new chips will directly compete with AMD and Broadcom’s emerging AI server offerings.
The investment follows an 8.9-billion-dollar US government stake in Intel and comes weeks after Softbank’s 2-billion-dollar injection.
