The non-public AI agent increase is giving Advanced Micro Devices and Intel new life after the businesses spent years watching Nvidia and its GPUs dominate the bogus intelligence market.
The central processing unit, or CPU, was as soon as the first workhorse of a pc server earlier than Nvidia’s graphics processing items took heart stage with the launch of ChatGPT and the beginning of the generative AI period. Now CPUs are again, lifting the fortunes of market leaders AMD and Intel, whose chips specialise in powering long-running brokers that may work for hours on their very own.
Final week OpenAI released its AI agent Dots, following the lead of Meta, which debuted Muse in early September. Muse caught on so rapidly that it topped the Apple App Retailer in less than two weeks. Nicely earlier than that, AMD and Intel have been already large winners within the inventory market this 12 months due largely to surging demand for CPUs, however they’ve picked up steam previously month, leaping 32% and 21%, respectively, beating all of tech’s megacaps.
AMD’s rising energy in each CPUs and GPUs has pushed the corporate into the trillion-dollar market cap membership.
“As extra brokers are created and developed, and extra individuals begin to use them for extra duties, it’ll begin to shift the workload away from GPUs and onto CPUs,” mentioned Ryan Shrout, president of Signal65, which consults on AI {hardware} and prices.
Customers realized concerning the energy behind the brand new brokers by asking them. Muse tells customers that it runs on an AMD-powered pc, whereas Dots mentioned it runs on a digital pc powered by AMD’s EPYC-branded CPU.
A Meta spokesperson advised CNBC that the corporate designed its system to make use of no matter sort of CPU is on the market.
“We take a various strategy to our {hardware} and are largely CPU-agnostic by design, which supplies us probably the most flexibility in buying capability,” the Meta spokesperson mentioned in a press release.
OpenAI equally makes use of a number of CPU suppliers, which means AMD is not the one sport on the town.
Most servers at hyperscalers — Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft — use CPUs made by Intel or AMD. However almost each main cloud supplier can also be creating customized chips of their very own, sometimes primarily based on Arm know-how. Arm announced its own CPU for brokers in March, with Meta because the debut buyer, and its inventory value has greater than doubled since.
Earlier this 12 months, Nvidia launched Vera — a totally redesigned central processor — together with an entire rack filled only with the CPUs. The chip large says it constructed the brand new Vera CPUs specifically for agents and expects CPUs to be a $200 billion market by 2030.
But it surely’s one a part of the chip trade the place Nvidia is not presently the favourite, analysts say.
“It is only a new product and they’ll be competing in opposition to a variety of completely different gamers,” Jordan Klein, an analyst at Mizuho Securities, mentioned in an interview, including that he believes AMD presently has the “greatest product.”
CPUs are driving a wholesome portion of AMD’s development. Income within the firm’s knowledge heart enterprise greater than doubled to $6.7 billion within the quarter resulted in June, accounting for nearly 60% of complete gross sales.
“The dialog has modified fairly a bit during the last eight to 10 months by way of agentic utilization,” mentioned Dan McNamara, AMD’s senior vp and normal supervisor of compute and enterprise AI. McNamara added that CPU gross sales are going to “actually ramp.”
GPUs suppose, CPUs do
Muse, Dots and even coding software program like OpenAI’s Codex use AI fashions to plan duties that may run autonomously. The brokers want their very own pc that may run for hours and even days within the background, defined Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman.
GPUs are nonetheless wanted for inference, or processing an AI mannequin, however an agent additionally wants a CPU.
“CPUs are literally performing the workflows whereas GPUs are doing the considering,” Newman mentioned.
Meta and OpenAI use digital machines, which partition a server into a number of lighter digital computer systems, so one server can help scores of customers.
Some AMD EPYC processors have as much as 192 CPU cores. In accordance with benchmarks and the brokers themselves, Muse’s digital pc makes use of two cores and Dots makes use of 9.
CPUs are cheaper than GPUs.
Benchmarks and queries present Dots utilizing an AMD EPYC 9V74 CPU, which is on the market from resellers for underneath $3,000. The EPYC 9D25 reportedly used by Meta for Muse prices even much less on the secondary market. Nvidia GPUs can value greater than 10 instances that for a single chip, they usually’re normally offered in clusters of a whole bunch or 1000’s of chips.
Buyers are watching how Meta plans to serve Muse customers, after downloads surpassed 5 million since final month’s launch, in keeping with Sensor Tower. Morgan Stanley estimates Muse’s serving prices at $3 to $130 per thirty days, with a mean of $37 per consumer, relying on inference utilization.
The agency says Meta’s agent might account for 20% of AMD’s 2026 chip gross sales.
Superior Micro Gadgets (AMD) CEO Lisa Su delivers a speech throughout a discussion board at Taipei Marriott Lodge in Taipei on Could 22, 2026.
I-Hwa Cheng | Afp | Getty Photos
There’s some huge cash to be made in CPUs, and forecasts for the section’s development are accelerating.
Futurum estimates $118 billion in complete CPU gross sales in 2027, virtually double the agency’s earlier forecast in Could.
In July, AMD predicted all the CPU market would hit $220 billion in gross sales in 2030, up from a earlier 2025 forecast of $60 billion. AMD mentioned in July that it expects to take greater than half of the market.
AMD presently instructions about 46% of the marketplace for x86 CPU items, Mercury Analysis said in August. Intel can also be seeing a surge in demand.
However AMD has a foothold with hyperscalers, which is the place lots of the digital machines for brokers will probably be deployed. It additionally has the advantage of utilizing an x86 structure for its chips, permitting brokers to make use of older software program with out worrying about compatibility points.
“AMD might be getting probably the most of this as a result of they’ve the most important market share and the cloud hyperscaler world for CPUs,” Klein mentioned, including that he “would not rule Nvidia out.”
“If you’re an organization that may provide each kinds of chips, you are in one of the best place,” Klein mentioned.
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