NVIDIA CFO claims company is on track to become world's leading CPU supplier, expanding beyond GPU dominance.

Nvidia, already the world's largest GPU supplier, is aggressively pursuing the CPU market with a projected $20 billion in CPU revenues this year. "We have visibility to nearly $20 billion in total CPU revenue this year, setting us up to become the world's leading CPU supplier," Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said during the company's Q1 2027 earnings call. Though Nvidia announced its first Arm datacenter chip, codenamed Grace, back in 2021, these processors were historically integrated into GPU systems for AI datacenters. This shift accelerated in February when Nvidia revealed that Meta was among the first hyperscalers deploying standalone Grace CPU Superchips to power various workloads, including the social network's AI agents.

At its GTC conference in March, Nvidia officially expanded its CPU lineup with the Vera CPU system, featuring 88 custom Olympus Arm cores with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) support alongside confidential computing capabilities. Each chip can be equipped with up to 1.5 TB of LPDDR5x SOCAMM memory, delivering higher memory bandwidth at up to 1.2 TB/s while consuming minimal power. According to Kress, "Vera will deliver up to 1.5x faster performance per core, 2x performance per watt, and 4x density per rack compared to x86-based alternatives." Nvidia's reference designs pack up to two Vera CPUs onto a single board connected via high-speed NVLink interconnects, with Vera paired in a 2:1 ratio of Rubin GPUs to CPUs in the company's most powerful rack-scale AI compute platforms. This week, Anthropic, OpenAI, Oracle, and SpaceX took delivery of Nvidia's first Vera-based systems, and Kress claims nearly every major hyperscaler and system builder plans deployment.

The Vera CPU launch opens what Kress describes as a "brand new $200 billion TAM for Nvidia, a market we have never addressed before," though the chips are designed primarily for AI and HPC applications rather than as wholesale x86 replacements. Nvidia capped off a strong first quarter of fiscal 2027, generating $58.3 billion in profits on $81.6 billion in revenue—an 85 percent year-over-year increase and 20 percent sequential growth that Kress attributed to "an inflection in inference demand." The company's reorganized revenue structure shows datacenter operations dominated with $75.2 billion, split between $38 billion from hyperscaler and public cloud customers and $37 billion from neocloud, industrial, and enterprise customers, while edge sales contributed $6.4 billion, driven by demand for Blackwell-based workstation gear.

Looking ahead, Nvidia forecasted Q2 revenues of $91 billion plus or minus two percent, with the critical assumption that there would be no datacenter sales to China. Despite receiving Trump administration approval in December to sell its aging H200 processors to Chinese customers for the first time, shipments remain stalled by Beijing's regulatory processes, despite Nvidia having received billions of dollars in orders.