Nvidia’s new PC chips are the CEO’s attempt to “own” every part of the AI ​​stack

as important as Nvidia has permeated the technology industry, but its developments in recent years have all been related to data centers. Now, the chipmaker is eyeing the PC market, and Wall Street recognizes the threat it poses.

In his keynote speech at the Computex conference in Taiwan on Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company and microsofttrying to “reinvent the PC”. Nvidia’s plan to build a system-on-chip (SoC) for PCs advanced micro device, intel and Qualcomm downwards.

It’s the latest sign that Nvidia is moving beyond data centers for artificial intelligence to the so-called edge, where small devices like phones and computers run advanced AI models on the chips they carry, without relying on the cloud.

“NVIDIA’s entry into this space means Jensen recognizes that it wants to own every part of the AI ​​stack in some way,” said IDC analyst Tom Mainelli.

Nvidia shares soared more than 6% as makers of PC central processing units (CPUs) and mobile phone chips fell on Monday. Nvidia’s market capitalization is about $5.4 trillion, making it more valuable than any company on the planet and nearly $1 trillion more than its closest U.S. peer.

Nvidia is officially entering the PC market with a chip called RTX Spark, co-developed with Taiwan’s MediaTek. RTX Spark, which Huang also referred to as N1X, will debut later this year in new Windows PC lines from Microsoft, Dell, HP, ASUS, Lenovo and more. MSI.

“This reinvention of the computer is as big an event as reinventing the phone into what we now know as the smartphone,” Huang said, pointing to the fact that agent AI will work on all new computers.

Nvidia has a strong balance sheet and momentum in the world. But this doesn’t mean it will be easy to break out of a market that has historically been dominated by the duopoly of Intel and AMD. Additionally, Qualcomm has introduced new SoCs for Windows laptops in the past two years. appleThe company, which accounts for about 9% of the PC market, began manufacturing its own processors in 2020.

Nvidia’s rise has been fueled by sales of systems based on data center graphics processing units (GPUs), which are suitable for running cutting-edge AI models with unlimited power, cooling, and space. As chips become powerful enough to run AI at the edge, Nvidia is racing to get there.

“All AI computing is the prize, no matter where it is,” said chip analyst Patrick Moorhead. “Jensen won’t be satisfied with just data centers and data centers and cars. They want everything to be at the edge.”

Economically, PCs are just big money for Nvidia, at least in the short term.

Ben Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, estimated Monday that Nvidia’s networking business alone (which had revenue of about $15 billion in its most recent quarter) is at least 20 times the size of Nvidia’s PC business. Total data center revenue exceeded $75 billion in the most recent quarter.

Intel’s Client Computing Group, which primarily consists of PC chip sales, reported full-year sales of $32.2 billion in 2025.

“PC for Nvidia is very underpenetrated, so this is the beginning of an attempt to capture some share of the edge story,” Bajarin said.

Seaport Research Partners analyst Jay Goldberg said in a note that he doesn’t expect big numbers from Nvidia’s PC chips “any time soon.” He has a sell rating on the stock.

It’s also far from the high-growth market that Nvidia has led since generative AI began in late 2022. Market research firm IDC estimates that 296 million PC chips will be shipped in 2025, the first increase in three years but still well below the pandemic-era peak of 361 million in 2021. Nvidia could sell 10 million PC chips over the next two years, Moorhead said.

“AI PC”, a concept introduced by Microsoft and its PC partners in 2024, hasn’t sparked much of a resurgence due to a lack of new software and Microsoft’s challenges with Copilot technology.

But some analysts say NVIDIA’s superior capabilities in AI could bring a different level of enthusiasm and credibility.

“This is not the first time NVIDIA has done this,” Mainelli said. “But they bring the GPU chops and a lot of the AI ​​in the cloud is built on Nvidia, so the fact that they’re pushing this to devices is very interesting.”

Nvidia’s RTX Spark chips combine the company’s cutting-edge Blackwell GPU and MediaTek CPU on the same SoC. It also comes with a feature called unified memory. This allows the CPU and GPU to access the same memory on a single SoC, eliminating a key AI bottleneck and allowing the chip to run larger and more capable AI models.

In unveiling the chip, Huang tied the technology to one of Silicon Valley’s hottest trends: AI agents. Every developer seems to be hooked on the ability to run agents like OpenClaw or Hermise Agent in the background to further increase productivity.

Huang suggested that this type of agent could work perfectly well locally and could be cheaper than in the cloud.

“Look, how beautiful it is. This agent can run off the meter 24/7,” said Huang, holding up MSI’s small Nvidia-based computer. “I don’t have to worry about the meter.”

Nvidia’s announcement is also the latest sign of strength. arm.

For decades, CPUs have been built on the x86 instruction set, pioneered by Intel in the 1970s and by AMD decades later.

Arm’s alternative power-efficient architecture became mainstream in 2007 when Apple adopted it for its first iPhone. Amazon When it announced its Graviton processor in 2018, it helped popularize Arm-based chips for data centers. In 2020, NVIDIA tried to get ahead of its SoC ambitions by acquiring Arm for $40 billion. The deal was snapped up by regulators.

Cloud rivals Google and Microsoft followed Amazon’s lead with their own custom Arm CPUs for data centers. Currently, the entire CPU market is experiencing a resurgence as AI deployments move from call-and-answer chatbots to task-oriented agent apps. The overall CPU market is exploding, and Huang says it will become a $200 billion industry.

Amid the CPU renaissance, many companies are switching from x86 to Arm.

Apple will end its 15-year reliance on Intel x86 chips in 2023 and now uses Arm-based processors in its computers. The latest MacBook, released in March, comes with a higher price tag and Apple’s latest M5 CPU.

Arm announced its first in-house CPU in March. metaopen AI, cloudflare and SAP As an early customer. AMD is also reportedly working on developing Arm-based PC chips.

Nvidia’s RTX Spark chips will likely first appear in expensive computers, with lower-priced computers to follow. Nvidia-powered computers with AI capabilities from companies like adobe And Microsoft could be the first laptop in years to give Apple’s MacBook serious competition in the premium category.

“This is the closest thing to a MacBook Pro for the Windows ecosystem,” Moorhead said.

WATCH: Arm unveils its own CPU, Meta becomes first customer