Nvidia move deals a major blow to AMD, Intel, and ARM
Nvidia move deals a major blow to AMD, Intel, and ARM originally appeared on TheStreet.
Nvidia climbed to become the largest company on the U.S. stock market. But how can it keep growing after hitting a $4 trillion market capitalization?
Every company reaches its peak at some point. Are we witnessing Nvidia’s, or can it hit $5 trillion?
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That is a tricky question to answer, but the company thinks it can, and there is a lot more juice to be squeezed out of the artificial intelligence boom.
The U.S. government recently reversed its export restrictions on Nvidia cards to China and assured the company that licenses will be granted. This change prompted many analysts to revamp the stock price target.
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“China generated $17 billion in revenue for Nvidia in 2024, roughly 13% of the company’s total revenue. In response to this news, we are lifting our NVDA price target to $200 from $185, and reiterating our One rating,” writes veteran fund manager Chris Versace for TheStreet Pro.
The company wasn’t sitting down idly and waiting for this China miracle. It was making moves in Europe.
On July 17, Nvidia (NVDA) revealed on its blog that the University of Bristol launched its Isambard-AI supercomputer. Nvidia Grace Hopper Superchips power it and deliver 21 exaflops of AI performance.
While this supercomputer’s 5,448 GH200 Superchips are impressive, they can’t match the Jupiter supercomputer announced in June.
Jupiter is also powered by the Grace Hopper platform, with nearly 24,000 GH200 Superchips. With its expected performance of over 90 exaflops, it is the fastest in Europe.
Finding new customers for new supercomputers must reach a slowdown at some point. Nvidia knows this, and it’s betting on robotics being the next big boom.
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Jetson Thor is Nvidia’s upcoming platform for physical AI and humanoid robotics. According to the company, it will be able to deliver up to 2070 FP4 TFLOPS of AI compute. This platform features a 14-core Arm Neoverse-V3AE 64-bit CPU and a 2560-core NVIDIA Blackwell GPU.
What is often neglected in the AI GPU hype is that you need a CPU to actually run the software that will then use GPUs for calculations. Nvidia doesn’t have its own CPU architecture and has to rely on ARM for this embedded (Thor) platform.
The same goes for its Grace Superchips; for the CPU part, they have 72 high-performance Arm v9 cores.
Nvidia tried to acquire ARM but was prevented by regulatory problems. The primary reason for the acquisition may have been licensing costs.
Nvidia Hardware Engineering VP Frans Sijstermans presented his “Enabling RISC-V Application Processors in NVIDIA Compute Platforms” at RISC-V Summit China, revealing that CUDA is coming to RISC-V.
RISC-V is an open source instruction set architecture. This means anyone can make a CPU based on it, and the company does not have to pay for the license, although the company that makes its RISC-V compatible design can license its design.
“This port will enable a RISC-V CPU to be the main application processor in a CUDA-based AI system,” said RISC-V International.
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The timing of this Nvidia move is very interesting.
In an attempt to lower the country’s dependence on Western-owned technology, China plans to issue guidance to boost the use of open-source RISC-V chips nationwide, reported Reuters in March.
Also in March, XuanTie, part of Alibaba’s DAMO Academy R&D operation, announced a C930 CPU design, reported The Register. This RISC-V-based design is available to license for system-on-chip makers. The company is marketing its CPU as something that can be used in servers, PCs, and autonomous cars.
This is not the only RISC-V-based CPU available, but it is probably the one with the strongest backing, making China’s push to switch to RISC-V look more credible.
Nvidia is ensuring that China continues to rely on its GPUs by supporting RISC-V, which is why they are porting CUDA. However, this will also strengthen the viability of the RISC-V platform as a whole and therefore hurt x86 and ARM.
The company also has experience with RISC-V; in 2016, it switched from its proprietary Falcon microprocessor, which was used as a logic controller in its GPUs, to RISC-V.
This port also signals Nvidia’s possible switch to RISC-V for its CPU cores. If the company can pull it off, it would bring a lot of savings from not having to pay for ARM licensing.
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Nvidia move deals a major blow to AMD, Intel, and ARM first appeared on TheStreet on Jul 22, 2025
This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Jul 22, 2025, where it first appeared.