Dive Brief:

• Nvidia is eyeing the $200 billion CPU market as it expands into general-purpose computing to power agentic AI, EVP and CFO Colette Kress told investors Wednesday, during the company’s Q1 2027 earnings call for the three months ended April 26.
• The GPU giant expects the AI-optimized Vera CPU processor unveiled in March to drive $20 billion in revenue this year, Kress said. Nvidia delivered the first batch of processors to Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Oracle earlier this week.
• Nvidia’s CPU push comes amid an AI-driven GPU deployment frenzy. Hyperscale cloud providers installed thousands of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, driving roughly half of the company’s $75 billion data center revenues during Q1. The balance, totaling $37 billion, was tied to neocloud, industrial and enterprise accounts, which more than tripled in volume year over year, Kress said.

Dive Insight:

Nvidia’s fortunes have been tied to the rapid rise of generative AI and demand for high-capacity compute to train and operate large language models. The company’s quarterly revenues have multiplied tenfold in the last three years, growing from just over $7 billion at the start of FY2024, to $81.6 billion in Q1 2027. 

In just the last year, Nvidia’s revenue nearly doubled. 

While multibillion dollar hyperscaler infrastructure investments remain a major growth driver, Nvidia is broadening its revenue base to support a shift to agentic AI. The technology is at an inflection point, Kress said.

“Since the advent of ChatGPT, we have witnessed mainstream AI transition from one-shot inference to reasoning and to now agentic,” said Kress. “AI is now a necessity for enhancing productivity across all industries and roles. This is propelling revenue acceleration across all layers of the AI cake, including energy, chips, infrastructure, models and applications.”

Global IT investments underscore the trend.

AI infrastructure spending will approach $1.5 trillion globally this year, according to Gartner’s latest forecast. In the next five years, cloud providers will increase server spending threefold, the analyst firm said.

Nvidia began reporting hyperscaler revenue separately from other subsegments this year, in part to spotlight accelerating demand outside of concentrated revenue from a handful of massive cloud providers.

“There’s a whole second category of AI data centers that we serve almost uniquely,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during the Wednesday call. “This segment is very fragmented. It requires a well-integrated platform solution and a large go-to-market.”

While Nvidia’s revenue from hyperscaler customers increased modestly in Q1, growing 12% compared with the previous quarter, the second category had a steeper 31% quarter-over-quarter spike. Nvidia expects that trend to continue.

“If you look at industrial and enterprise, clearly, that's where future economics is going to be because it represents some $50 trillion, $80 trillion of the world's economy,” Huang said.