Things haven’t looked good for Intel in the last few years.
Intel, once America’s star chipmaker, has overtaken rivals like AMD and Nvidia in the AI era. But now the chipmaker says a shift in artificial intelligence is actually helping their catch-up efforts, and it’s the growing popularity of agent AI.
In the company’s latest earnings call on Thursday, Intel reported a 7.2% rise in revenue and said it expects next-quarter revenue to beat market expectations. Intel has many other factors to thank for its sunny outlook, e.g Profitable contracts with Elon Musk’s companies Tesla and SpaceX For the recently announced incredibly ambitious chip factory project and A deal with the Trump administration It saw the US take a 10% stake in the company. But the chipmaker attributes much of its success last quarter to increased demand for central processing units (CPUs).
General processing units, or GPUs, have become the chips most closely associated with the artificial intelligence boom, and CPUs, which not long ago powered most of the technology coming out of Silicon Valley, have been relegated to secondary status. Now experts argue that CPUs are undergoing a renaissance as artificial intelligence enters a new phase marked by intense hype for agent AI systems like Openclaw and Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said on the company’s earnings call that demand for the processors is strong because the chips are more efficient at “some orchestration, control plane” and data management tasks that are more important in agent systems.
Earlier this week Morgan Stanley analysts The agency has argued that AI systems will require more attention to coordination than simple computing power, saying they expect the AI bottleneck to shift from GPUs to CPUs, and CPUs can help act as this control layer. Nvidia executives have been whistling a similar tune for months.
“The bottleneck is shifting from computing to context management,” said Dion Harris, Nvidia’s senior director of HPC and AI hyperscale infrastructure solutions. press briefing At CES in January.
Then, last month at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference, the company’s CEO Jensen Huang of agent AI 1 trillion dollars in revenue for the company, before announcing a big push into CPUs.
Intel’s latest quarter numbers are a strong indication that this new phase of the AI hype that tech insiders have been predicting for the past few months may already be starting.
“For the past few years, the story of high-performance computing has been almost exclusively about GPUs and other accelerators,” Intel CEO Lip Bu-Tan said on the company’s earnings call. “In recent months, we’ve seen clear signs of the CPU repositioning itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era. The CPU now serves as the orchestration layer and critical control plane for the entire AI stack. That’s not just our desire, it’s what we’re hearing from our customers, and it’s evident in the demand profile.”
In past years, the ratio of on-demand CPUs to GPUs was one to eight, Tan said on the earnings call. Now this ratio is claimed to have risen to four to one. So this doesn’t mean that GPUs are no longer important. But that means you should prepare to hear the word CPU a lot more.
