Intel targets Nvidia with new AI inference chip by year-end
The US semiconductor giant aims to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the artificial intelligence hardware market with a dedicated inference graphics processing unit, coinciding with a significant rally in its equity value.
Intel has announced plans to release a new graphics processing unit (GPU) designed specifically for artificial intelligence inference tasks by the end of the year. The timeline was confirmed by the leader of the company’s data centre unit, marking a direct challenge to Nvidia’s current dominance in the high-performance computing sector.
The announcement comes at a pivotal moment for the US semiconductor manufacturer, whose shares have rallied more than 200% this year. This surge in market valuation reflects growing investor confidence in the company’s strategic pivot towards AI hardware, even as it seeks to close the gap with competitors who currently hold a significant lead in the market.
Intel’s entry into the inference segment is a strategic move to capture a larger share of the rapidly expanding AI infrastructure spend. While Nvidia has established a strong foothold with its training and inference chips, Intel aims to leverage its new GPU to offer an alternative for data centres looking to deploy AI models at scale.
The competitive landscape has intensified recently, with Nvidia shipping its Vera CPU, a processor featuring 88 custom 'Olympus' cores based on ARM architecture. Designed for agentic AI and reinforcement learning, the Vera CPU reportedly delivers twice the performance of its previous-generation Grace CPU and is the first to support FP8 precision, setting a high bar for performance metrics in the industry.
Market sentiment has been further buoyed by broader geopolitical and corporate developments. US stock markets have shown gains, with Nvidia shares rising more than 2% following recent US approvals. Meanwhile, major tech firms continue to report strong earnings, driving institutional buying and reinforcing the outlook for sustained demand in the AI hardware sector.
