Nvidia wages chip war on 2 fronts with Vera and RTX Spark

Nvidia is taking on Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Apple simultaneously with two new chips that expand its reach beyond GPUs.

Nvidia Corp. is attacking two new chip markets at once — AI laptops and data center CPUs — with the RTX Spark superchip and the 88-core Vera processor, challenging Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Apple on their home turf.

"Agentic AI is the next major workload shift, and inference at scale demands tighter CPU and GPU coupling," Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said at the company's GTC Taipei event, where both chips were unveiled.

The RTX Spark combines a Blackwell GPU with a 20-core Arm-based Grace CPU, up to 128 gigabytes of unified memory and 300 GB/s of memory bandwidth, all packaged into a thin Windows laptop. The Vera data center CPU claims a 50% performance gain over standard processors, fueled by a 1.5-times improvement in instructions per cycle from its custom Olympus cores, with a rack-scale architecture squeezing 256 liquid-cooled chips into a single unit.

Nvidia held just 6.2% of the server CPU market at the end of 2025, against Intel's 60% and AMD's 24%, according to industry data. Analysts cited by Proactive Investors estimate Nvidia could capture roughly two-thirds of the x86 server CPU market, targeting $20 billion in CPU revenue — a figure that would dwarf Intel and AMD's individual data center CPU businesses.

RTX Spark Targets the AI PC Market

The RTX Spark includes the full RTX and DLSS 4.5 graphics stack with native anti-cheat support, addressing one of the thorniest obstacles for Arm-based Windows gaming. Nvidia is betting the superchip can do for AI PCs what discrete GeForce GPUs did for gaming laptops: create a performance category that software developers can reliably target. The move puts Nvidia in direct competition with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and Apple's M-series chips in the premium laptop segment.

Vera Opens a $20 Billion CPU Opportunity

Nvidia's entry into standalone processor sales marks a strategic shift for a company that has traditionally positioned its CPUs as companion chips to its GPUs. The Vera architecture uses custom Olympus cores and a rack-scale design that packs 256 liquid-cooled chips into a single unit, targeting the inference workloads Huang described as the next growth wave. If Nvidia captures the market share analysts project, its CPU business alone could surpass the individual data center revenue of Intel and AMD.

The risk is one of strategic overreach. Nvidia is asking investors to believe it can displace Intel and AMD in the data center, challenge Qualcomm and Apple in the premium laptop market, and sustain its GPU supremacy simultaneously. A single misstep in any of these new markets could pressure the stock, which has more than doubled over the past year on AI enthusiasm.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.