Spend USD 5 billion to invest in Intel! It is not about crystal OEM, what does NVIDIA want?

NVIDIA announced on Thursday (18th) that it would invest $5 billion in strategic investment in Intel and signed a joint development agreement on personal computers and data center infrastructure, making NVIDIA one of Intel's largest shareholders.

The core of this cooperation lies in the use of NVLink technology to achieve uncensored connection with the Intel architecture, and also expands NVIDIA's GPU Empire to the Integrated Graphics field, which is led by Intel and AMD.

According to the cooperation agreement, Intel will design a personal computer processor with built-in NVIDIA GPU chips; NVIDIA is also avenue for the Intel Xeon platform, allowing it to play a more important role in AI-based facilities and data center product lines. By integrating NVLink interconnect technology into CPU design, NVIDIA can also provide an NVL72 system based on self-developed CPUs and Intel Xeon processors to further expand the market share of the personal computer graphics market.

NVIDIA executive chief Huang Rensheng said at a reporter conference on Thursday, "Now we can directly integrate Intel x86 CPUs into the NVLink ecosystem to create these rack-level AI supercomputers."

Intel's latest generation Xeon processor uses modular I/O chips, and integrating NVLink is relatively simple a few years ago. For Intel, this cooperation is essentially a shortcut, quickly joining the competition for aircraft-level computing.

What can NVIDIA get from this transaction?

In addition to about 4% of Intel shares, NVIDIA and Intel are expected to have closer cooperation in hardware design, and can help the former to further reach Intel's large customer base.

Huang Renxian believes that the serviceable market size of the data center CPU is about US$25 billion, and the power market is 150 million units a year. It is expected that this investment return will be very amazing. From this we can see that the computer market may be the part that NVIDIA really values. When directly integrating its own GPU into Intel processors, NVIDIA has the opportunity to enter a market that was untouchable in the past.

"There is an entire segment in the market that integrates CPU and GPU, which may be due to design requirements, cost considerations, battery life, or other different reasons." Huang Renshi said that this segment is basically something that NVIDIA has not reached, and this segment in the market is actually very large and very favorable, but it is still not fully met today.

The market focuses on whether the cooperation with Intel will affect the advancement of Arm architecture, but Huang Rensheng will continue to adjust Arm routes. Currently, there are many customers and are also building the next generation of Vera architecture products.

When talking about Intel's crystalline foundry business, Huang Renxing admitted that he has always evaluated Intel's foundry technology and will continue to do this in the future, but this announcement is entirely focused on custom CPUs, which means that the cooperation with NVIDIA focuses on products rather than manufacturing.

Foreign media believe that although NVIDIA will continue to invest in NTD, Intel's foundry business still has the opportunity to accept benefits, such as taking orders for packaging and final assembly.

Intel and Nvidia sitting in a tree, NVLink-I-N-G

Extended reading: NVIDIA and Intel cooperate to strengthen the principle of addition and do not change the original plan, and the cooperation with NTU will continue. Funding support from all parties and cooperation with NVIDIA, China News Service: Intel's short-term stock price has turned over