Nvidia barely mentioned Arm Holdings in its press release announcing a new personal-computer processor, but investors think chip designer Arm could be the biggest winner of the endeavor.
Shares of Arm are up 14% in premarket action on Monday. The stock has already more than tripled this year.
The move also helped ARM’s majority owner, SoftBank, which became Japan’s top company by market cap.
In conjunction with the GTC Taipei event, Nvidia announced RTX Spark, a PC “superchip” that it said will make Windows, Dell and HP personal computers better suited for the artificial-intelligence era.\
”MediaTek, a market leader in Arm-based system-on-a-chip designs, collaborated with Nvidia on the custom CPU design, contributing to its best-in-class power efficiency, performance and connectivity,” Nvidia said in the sole mention of Arm in its press release.
MediaTek shares rose more than 5% in Taiwan trading. The Arm-Nvidia collaboration is pressuring shares of other PC players, including Advanced Micro Devices, Intel and Qualcomm.
In a keynote speech, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the new chip will help autonomous AI agents run on PCs. He explained that the laptops will be able to better comb through files, conduct research and answer users’ questions.
Conducting on-device AI tasks requires more computing power.
“One hundred percent of the world’s PC industry has joined us to reinvent the PC,” Huang said in his speech.
The idea of AI PCs isn’t new, nor is Arm’s involvement in AI PC chips. It remains to be seen whether consumers will broadly see the benefits of running more AI tasks directly on laptops. But now Arm is teaming up with the world’s largest company, which itself has scored collaborations with leading PC vendors.
“AI is moving to every device and every physical system,” Arm CEO Rene Haas said on the company’s latest earnings call in early May. “Phones, PCs, vehicles, factories, robots, cameras, sensors and connected devices all need efficient, secure compute with software that scales. These AI workloads will all run on Arm.”
Haas is due to give his own keynote at Computex on Tuesday.
