Nvidia buys $5 billion stake in Intel, planning AI chip collaboration (techcrunch.com)

Nvidia is buying a $5 billion (about 4% equity) stake in Intel and striking a broad technology partnership to co-develop “multiple generations” of data center and PC products. As part of the plan Intel will manufacture x86 CPUs tuned for Nvidia’s AI infrastructure for enterprise and hyperscale customers, and will produce consumer “x86 RTX SoCs” that integrate Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets. Nvidia will pay $23.28 a share, making it one of Intel’s largest shareholders and sending Intel stock sharply higher. Technically this is notable because the companies will link CPU and GPU architectures using Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect rather than relying solely on PCIe. NVLink enables higher bandwidth and lower-latency transfers of data and control code between chips—critical for scaling multi-GPU AI training and inference. The deal pairs Nvidia’s software and accelerated-computing stack with Intel’s process technology, manufacturing and advanced packaging (chiplets), potentially accelerating performance-per-dollar for AI workloads, improving power efficiency in PCs, and shifting competitive dynamics against AMD and other chipmakers. For the AI/ML community, tighter CPU–GPU integration and vendor-aligned hardware could simplify system design and boost throughput for large models, while raising questions about ecosystem openness and future vendor lock-in.