Art of Speculation
Chinese-Language AI Fundamentals & Macro, Concentrated Investing
Intel and AMD face a real shift in competition as NVIDIA moves into CPUs faster and more directly than expected. On NVIDIA's earnings call, Jensen Huang said its new Vera CPU platform will contribute $20 billion of standalone revenue this year. The pressure on Intel and AMD is not just fund rotation but a genuine change in the competitive landscape. x.com
Intel, AMD and Arm are a 24-36 month structural opportunity as AI shifts from computation to orchestration, making the CPU the control plane. Agent workflows are serial and branch-heavy, CPU-to-GPU ratios are moving from 1:8 toward 1:2 or 1:1, and tight supply restores pricing power. Intel has a CPU-plus-US-foundry story with high execution risk; AMD keeps taking server share; Arm is the long-term architecture winner. After an 18-day semiconductor rally, wait for pullbacks rather than chase. x.com x.com x.com
Nvidia can capture more AI infrastructure spending by supplying Vera CPUs and networking alongside GPUs. Oracle outlined an initial supply of 150,000 Vera CPUs, and OpenAI says it is putting them into production for agent tool execution; reducing CPU waits could improve cost per task and GPU-memory use. Benefits from independently scaling CPUs and GPUs still need validation in utilization and completion times. x.com
AI infrastructure bottlenecks could give eight stocks as much as 18x upside. Nvidia supplies frontier-model GPUs; Broadcom and Marvell supply custom silicon and networking; TSMC makes advanced chips; Micron supplies sold-out HBM; Vertiv provides power and cooling; Palantir monetizes enterprise AI; Alphabet spans TPUs, research, cloud and apps. The list tracks where AI infrastructure spending is flowing. x.com x.com
Intel and Rambus could explode if Nvidia announces a co-designed Rubin Ultra or Feynman product with Intel, which looks like a matter of waiting. Agentic AI demand is through the roof, and Nvidia's Vera CPU volumes should exceed its VR200/300 volumes at maturity. x.com
More AI tokens mean more compute demand for Nvidia even as pricing power starts to slip. OpenRouter data via the FT show weekly token use up ~250-fold since January 2025; the FT links the surge to agents' long call chains. Bloomberg's breakdown of a 1 GW AI campus that could cost roughly $30B puts well over half the bill in chips and servers, most landing at Nvidia as GPU racks. Servers wear out in 5-6 years, making AI capex a recurring chip refresh. x.com x.com x.com x.com x.com x.com x.com
Arm benefits from NVIDIA's Vera CPU ramp through volume, even though custom Olympus cores earn it lower per-chip royalties than Grace. Jefferies raised its target to $290 from $210 on visibility into about $20 billion of Vera this year, opening a roughly $200 billion CPU market in sockets Intel and AMD dominated. Arm's own AGI CPU, with Meta as launch partner and about $2 billion of early interest, adds direct revenue. If Vera takes most of that market, the AGI CPU opportunity could shrink. … Show more
AMD could see much more accelerator demand as OpenAI and Anthropic allegedly increase their orders by multiple gigawatts. Nvidia's only real edge over AMD may soon be its size and resources; Lisa Su is a master operator. x.com
Nvidia's numbers are still underappreciated, giving a really good risk/reward at 18-19x forward earnings. Revenue rose 106% to $96.2B, data center 117% to $89B, with 75% gross margin and $108B next-quarter guidance excluding China. Nvidia now sells the whole AI factory, GPUs, CPUs, networking, systems and software, capturing more of the stack each generation. The valuation already prices a spending slowdown, the familiar bear case alongside hyperscaler in-house chips. x.com x.com
Arm is no longer just a royalty collector, a radical change in its business, and agentic AI demand for sold-out CPUs is amplifying the move. Arm-based CPUs could capture nearly 90% of host CPU deployments in custom AI ASIC servers by 2029, and Nvidia was expected to unveil a new Arm-based processor at Computex. Not all of the rally is fundamentals, and the stock could pause around $400; in this kind of market, price action works better than P/E. x.com x.com
Nvidia, AMD and Intel benefit as agentic AI drives server CPU demand, highlighted by Akamai's $11.6bn, seven-year accelerating CPU agreement with Anthropic, with a potential $9bn expansion. Anthropic will run growing CPU workloads on Akamai's distributed AI infrastructure, where Nvidia has flagged Vera CPU deployments built for code, orchestration and data processing. Server CPU TAM is estimated at $215bn by 2030, with positive read-throughs to DRAM, NAND and ABF substrates. x.com
Nvidia can raise prices 15% and still leave customers plenty of margin because Vera Rubin delivers 2-30x more throughput per megawatt than Blackwell Ultra, depending on interactivity. A megawatt of Vera Rubin racks should generate at least twice the revenue of Blackwell racks, and much more in some configurations. SpaceXAI also appears to be a new standalone Vera CPU customer; Nvidia says Vera completes tasks up to 1.8x faster than x86 CPUs. x.com x.com
