OpenAI and Anthropic have signed large-scale partnership agreements with cloud providers, leading to significant consumption of cloud CPU capacity for reinforcement learning and agentic inference workloads. The shift to reinforcement learning requires CPUs for unit tests and validation in simulated environments, while agentic inference demands CPU processing for tool calls to search engines, databases, and code execution. NVIDIA has begun selling its Vera CPU as a standalone product, targeting $20 billion in related revenue, as Arm, Intel, and AMD have seen share price increases.
AI's evolving training and inference methods are creating a structural demand floor for CPUs, re-rating their valuation relative to GPUs.