Arm's rally is justified after Nvidia said on its call that the Vera CPU will be a $20B business in fiscal 2027, because Arm gets a cut of that. On Arm's $5B revenue base, that cut is meaningful. x.com
IvanaSPEAR
Founder & CIO of Spear Invest, Portfolio Manager of SPRX ETF
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
Arm is the architecture every AI CPU is built on, and agentic AI is driving massive CPU growth. Nvidia says its Arm-based Vera CPU opens a new $200B TAM, with $20B of CPU revenue visibility this year; AWS Graviton, Google Axion and Microsoft Cobalt also run on Arm. UBS sees Arm's server CPU unit share rising from 15% to 40-45% by 2030, and Arm doubled near-term AGI CPU demand guidance to $2B across FY27-28. Its royalty on Vera is likely lower than on Grace, but volume more than compensates. … Show more
Arm is hard to justify over Nvidia, which is cheaper and growing faster. Arm trades at 44x sales and 112x earnings with 28% two-year sales growth and 32% EPS growth, while Nvidia trades at 11x sales and 20x earnings with 60%+ growth in both. There is more to an investment case than these figures. 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
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
Arm cannot even raise its $2 billion customer-interest figure in what should be the greatest CPU market of our lifetimes, and whether it can deliver even that is still unproven. x.com
A rising value of compute per watt should benefit AI cloud, chip, connectivity and power suppliers. Elon Musk says that value will rise over time. Nebius has Microsoft and Meta deals; Marvell benefits from custom silicon demand; Credo connects GPUs; Vistra has long-term nuclear supply deals with Amazon and Meta; Nokia's Nvidia partnership could help it capture data-center networking growth. x.com x.com
AI agents benefit CPU and memory suppliers such as Arm, AMD and Qualcomm more than Nvidia and Broadcom; Marvell, TSMC and Micron also gain. Per @amitisinvesting, OpenAI has launched Dots as its answer to Meta's Muse, and more agents mean much more compute, which helps explain why semis have kept rising as the agent wars heat up. x.com
Arm's valuation carries an absurd premium for the architecture layer. It trades at 91.9x EV/sales, far above its historical range, as Wall Street prices it as the mandatory royalty tollbooth for every custom AI chip. EDA leaders Cadence, at 30.1x, and Synopsys, at 21.2x, trade near the low end of their historical bands, priced like mature utilities, as the market stacks almost all the scarcity premium into Arm. x.com
Arm collects royalties across the CPUs that AI workloads increasingly need, including AWS Graviton5, Google Axion, Azure Cobalt 200, Nvidia Grace and Vera, Qualcomm's Dragonfly C1000 and nearly all leading DPUs and SmartNICs. Anthropic locked in $11.6B over seven years with Akamai, expandable to about $20B, specifically for CPU workloads. x.com x.com