Nvidia, Intel to co-develop “multiple generations” of chips as part of $5 billion deal

In a major collaboration that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago, Nvidia announced today that it was buying a total of $5 billion in Intel stock, giving Intel's competitor ownership of roughly 4 percent of the company. In addition to the investment, the two companies said that they would be co-developing "multiple generations of custom data center and PC products."

"The companies will focus on seamlessly connecting NVIDIA and Intel architectures using NVIDIA NVLink," reads Nvidia's press release, "integrating the strengths of NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing with Intel’s leading CPU technologies and x86 ecosystem to deliver cutting-edge solutions for customers."

Rather than combining the two companies' technologies, the data center chips will apparently be custom x86 chips that Intel builds to Nvidia's specifications. Nvidia will "integrate [the CPUs] into its AI infrastructure platforms and offer [them] to the market."

On the consumer side, Intel plans to build x86 SoCs that integrate both Intel CPUs and Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets—Intel's current products use graphics chiplets based on its own Arc products. More tightly integrated chips could make for smaller gaming laptops and could give Nvidia a way to get into handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck or ROG Xbox Ally.

On a conference call with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan this afternoon, the CEOs said that the technical collaboration between teams at Nvidia and Intel had been ongoing for nearly a year, though neither company was ready to announce any products or get specific about launch windows. Chip designs can sometimes take years to come together, so it could still be months or years before the first products to come out of this partnership are actually available to buy.