Nvidia buys $5B in Intel | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

tomshardware.com

1,018 pointsstycznik611 comments

Nvidia's stake in Intel could have terrible consequences. First, it is in Nvidia's interest to kill Intel's Arc graphics, and that would be very bad because it is the only thing brighing GPU prices down for consumers. Second, the death of Intel graphics / Arc would be extremely bad for Linux, because Intel's approach to GPU drivers is the best for compatibility, wheras Nvidia is actively hostile to drivers on Linux. Third, Intel is the only company marketing consumer-grade graphics virtualization (SR-IOV), and the loss of that would make Nvidia's enterprise chips the only game in town, meaning the average consumer gets less performance, less flexibility, and less security on their computers.

Conclusion: Buy AMD. Excellent Linux support with in-tree drivers. For 15 years! A bug is something which will be fixed.

Nvidias GPUs are theoretically fast on initial benchmarks. But that’s mostly optimization by others for Nvidia? That’s it.

Everything Nvidia has done is a pain. Closed-source drivers (old pain), out of tree-drivers (new pain), ignoring (or actively harming) Wayland (everyone handles implicit sync well, except Nvidia which required explicit sync[1]), and awkward driver bugs declared as “it is not a bug, it is a feature”. The infamous bug:

    This extension provides a    way for applications to discover when video
    memory content has been lost, so that the application can re-populate
    the video memory content as necessary.

https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL/extensions/NV/NV_robustn...

This extension will be soon ten years old. At least they intend to fix it? They just didn’t in the past 9 years! Basically, video memory could be gone after Suspend/Resume, VT-Switch and so on. The good news is, after years someone figured that out and implemented a workaround. For X11 with GNOME:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Ubuntu-2025-SnR

I hope in the meantime somebody implemented a patch for Wayland.

What we need? Reliability. And Linux support. That’s why I purchase AMD. And previously Intel.

[1] I don’t judge whether implicit sync or explicit are better.

Apparently it is 5% ownership. Does that give them enough leverage to tank Intel’s iGPUs?

That would seem weird to be. Intel’s iGPUs are an incredibly good solution for their (non-glamorous) niche.

Intel’s dGPUs might be in a risky spot, though. (So… what’s new?)

Messing up Intel’s iGPUs would be a huge practical loss for, like, everyday desktop Linux folks. Tossing out their dGPUs, I don’t know if it is such a huge loss.

This misses the forest from the trees IMO:

- The datacenter GPU market is 10x larger than the consumer GPU market for Nvidia (and it's still growing). Winning an extra few percentage points in consumer is not a priority anymore.

- Nvidia doesn't have a CPU offering for the datacenter market and they were blocked from acquiring ARM. It's in their interest to have a friend on the CPU side.

- Nvidia is fabless and has concentrated supplier and geopolitical risk with TSMC. Intel is one of the only other leading fabs onshoring, which significantly improves Nvidia's supplier negotiation position and hedges geopolitical risk.

Not necessarily true. This might be a Microsoft funding a bankrupt Apple kind of moment.

American competition isn't a zero sum, and it's in Nvidias' best interest to keep the market healthy.

> Nvidia is actively hostile to drivers on Linux

Nvidia is contributing to Nova, the new Nvidia driver for GSP based hardware.

https://rust-for-linux.com/nova-gpu-driver

Alexandre Courbot, an Nvidia dev, is comaintainer.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NOVA-Core-Co-Maintainer

The article hints at it, but my guess would be this investment is intended towards Intel foundry and getting it to a place where NVIDIA can eventually rely on them over TSMC — and the ownership largely to give them upside if/when Intel stock goes up on news of an NVIDIA contract etc. It isn’t that uncommon of an arrangement for enterprise deals of such a potential magnitude. Long-term, however, and without NVIDIA making the call that could definitely have the effect of leading to Intel divesting from directly competing in as many markets, ie Arc.

For context, I highly recommend the old Stratechery articles on the history of Intel foundry.

Do we want Intel to fall and bankrupt? Or do we want Intel to survive. I dont think most people are clear what is happening here. This is it. The Margin call moment.

Intel could either transform into Fabless company compete on design, and manufacture with TSMC. Or they continue to be a Foundry player, crucial to US strategic interest. You can only pick one, and competing on just one of them is already a monumental task.

GPU is burning money. With no short term success in sight that could make them cash flow positive in 3 - 4 years time frame. I have been stating this since 2016 and we are now coming close to 2026, recent market share suggest Intel is at less than 1% discrete market share. Especially given the strong roadmap Nvidia has.

This gives a perfect excuse for Intel to quit GPU. Nvidia to provide the cash flow to hopefully continue to develop A18 and A14. Manufacture Nvidia GPU for them, and slowly transition itself out to only x86 + Foundry model. Or even solely manufacture for Nvidia. US administration further force Apple, Qualcomm and Broadcom to use Intel in some capacity. Assuming Intel can keep up with TSMC, which is probably a comparatively easier task than to tackle the GPU market.

I am assuming the Intel board is happy with that direction though. Because so far they have shown they are completely lack of any strategic vision.

If only antitrust laws would exist

This seems like it could be a long term existential threat for AMD. AMD CPU + GPU combos are finally coming out strong, both with MI300+ series in the supercomputing space, Strix Halo in laptops, etc. They have the advantage of being able to run code already optimized for x86 (important for gamers and HPC code), which NVIDIA doesn't have. Imagine if Grace Blackwell had x86 chips instead of Arm. If NVIDIA can get Intel CPUs with its chip offerings, it could be poised to completely take over so many new portions of the market/consolidate its current position by using its already existing mindshare and market dominance.

This seems more like the deal where Microsoft invested in Apple. It’s basically charity and they will flip it in a few years when Intel gets back on their feet.

You absolutely nailed it IMHO. I wish I had more upvotes to give. I guess time will tell, but this seems like a clear conflict of interest.

Now the whole purchase makes sense! : /

Using fortunes falling in the lap to kill competition is a common practice of economics (vs. technology) oriented organizations. That brings benefits only for the organization, for others it brings damages and disappointments.

Yeah, Nvidia has trillions at stake, Intel a mere 100B. It's more in the interests of Nvidia to interfere with Intel's GPU business than to help it, and the only things they want from Intel are the fabs.

At this point Nvidia is just shooting themselves in the foot with hostility towards Linux - they are actively using Linux systems for DGX systems and the dependency on Linux is only going to grow internally.

Something about this reminds me of other industry gobbling purchases. None of them ever turned out better for the product, price or general well being of society.

Microsoft’s investment in Apple was helpful for the world.

Markets seem to be at least reasonably competitive with 3 vendors. 2 vendors in a space often leads to less desirable outcomes for consumers.

> wheras Nvidia is actively hostile to drivers on Linux

Is that's why to use Cuda in Windows you have to use WSL2 (virtualized linux)

Reading this after that memo about China's attitude to Nvidia is actually chilling - they just don't care do they ?

why would they wanna kill intel? amd has better cpus and also goes gpu better than intel :?? (*yes i may be missing things,. pls do tell!)

I dont agree here. Nvidia could simply segment the market and keep intel on the low end of gpus. I think AMD is the real target/victim here.

a usable top gaming Intel GPU at good price is a myth :,(

nah, nvidia wouldnt do that

it would invite an DOJ case

No no, its in NVIDIA interest to ensure it's just good enough for the plebs, so they can continue to gouge the high rate market.

I agree. As a Linux user who favors Intel hardware due to their Linux support, I gotta say the future looks bleak.

This is a death blow to the Intel GPU+AI efforts and should not be allowed by the regulators. It is clear that Intel needs the downstream, low-cost GPU market segment to have a portfolio of AI chips based on chiplets, where most defective ones end up in the consumer grade GPUs based on manufacturing yield. NVidias interest is now for Intel not to enter either the GPU market, nor the AI market - which Intel was preparing for with its GPU efforts in recent years.

The US government is itself a major shareholder in Intel, and has every incentive to push Intel stock over its competitors. It's almost a certainty that Nvidia was forced into this deal by the government as well. We are way beyond regulation here.

Yep, there is absolutely no problem with that at all.

Never imagined politics so obviously manipulating the talking heads with nary a care about perception.

The US government isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) profit-motivated anyway, so it isn’t obvious what their incentives are WRT Intel’s stock.

They want a source of chips for the wars they want to conduct that is not either controlled by the party they want to go war with, or way way closer to the party they want to go to war with than they are. Buying a chunk of Intel is a way of making sure they do the things the government wants that will lead to that outcome. Or at least so the theory goes; I've got my own cynicism on this matter and wouldn't dream of tamping down on anyone else's.

Right now if the US wants to go to war with China, or anyone China really really likes, they can expect with high probability to very quickly encounter major problems getting the best chips. AIUI the world has other fab capacity that isn't in Taiwan, and some of it is even in the US, but they're all on much older processes. Some things it's not a problem that maybe you end up with an older 500MHz processor, but some things it's just a non-starter, like high-end AI.

Sibling commenters discussing profits are on the wrong track. Intel's 2024 revenue, not profits, was $53.1 billion. The Federal Government in 2024 spent $6,800 billion. No entity doing $1.8 trillion in 2024 in deficit spending gives a rat's ass about "profits". The US Federal government just spends what it wants to spend, it doesn't have any need to generate any sort of "profits" first. Thinking the Federal government cares about profits is being nowhere near cynical enough.

They can buy enough stock to shift the price, then use that as a lever to control their own investments prices (and thence profits). Like they've done with tariffs.

Shouldn't be, yes. Isn't? Have you seen the rhetoric around tariffs? A lot of people thought they wanted the government run like a business, so welcome to the for-profit government society.

What happens now if one of these companies implodes? does it pull everything with it?

Why would anything that isn't Intel implode? And what's "everything"?

Well, the AI bubble will eventually pop since none of the major AI chatbots are remotely profitable, even on OpenAI's eyewatering $200/month pay plan which very few have been willing to pay, and even on that OpenAI is still loosing money on it. And when it pops, so will Nvidia's stock, it's only a matter of time.

The AI hype train was built on the premise that AI will progress linearly and eventually end up replacing a lot of well paid white collar work, but it failed to deliver on that promise by now, and progress has flatlined or sometimes even gone backwards (see GPT-5 vs 4o).

FAANG companies can only absorb these losses for so long before shareholders pull out.

too big to fail

Regulators? In this administration?

There is no such thing.

Oh, there absolutely is where freedom of the press is concerned. Look no further than the new 'bias monitor' at CBS.

Wdym FCC just shut down that antifa Jimmothy Kimmithy.

Not shut down; regulated.

They are superceding regulations with the government just arbitrarily ordering companies to do things instead.

Mussolini would be proud.

Intel had an opportunity to differentiate themselves by offering more VRAM than Nvidia is willing to put in their consumer cards. It seemed like that was where Battlemage was going.

But now, are they really going to undermine this partnership for that? Their GPUs probably aren't going to become a cash cow anytime soon, but this thing probably will. The mindset among American business leaders of the past two decades has been to prioritize short-term profits above all else.

It may be that Nvidia doesn’t really see Intel as a competitor. Intel serve a part of the GPU market that Nvidia has no interest in. This reminds me a bit of Microsoft’s investment into Apple. Microsoft avoided the scorn of regulators by keeping Apple around as a competitor and if they succeed, great, they make money off of the deal.

I remember when I was studying for an MBA.. a professor was talking about the intangible value of a brand .. and finance.. and how they would reflect on each other .. At some point we were decomposing the parts of a balance sheet and they asked if one could sell the goodwill to invest in something else .. and the answer was of course .. no… well.. America has proven us wrong .. the way you sell the goodwill is to basically enshittification.. you quickly burn all your brand reputation by lowering your costs with shittier products .. your goodwill goes to 0 but your income increases so stock go up .. the CEO gets a fat bonus for it .. even tho the company itself is destroyed .. then the CEO quickly abandons ship and does the same on their next company .. rinse and repeat… infinite money!

We always called this “monetizing the brand” and it’s been annoying me since at least when Sperry when private equity and the shoes stopped being multi-year daily drivers

I don’t follow how it’s a death knell to intel AI chips. Nvidia bought shares, not a board seat. May be that’s the plan, but if you take the example of Microsoft buying apple shares that only gave apple a lifeline to build better. I do understand nvidia wants to have the whole gpu market to themselves but how will they do it?

> Nvidia bought shares, not a board seat.

I think the assumption there is that the strategic partnership that is part of the deal would in effect preclude Intel from aggressively competing with NVIDIA in that market, perhaps with the belief that the US governments financial stake in Intel would also lead to reduced anti-trust scrutiny of such an agreement not to compete.

They literally bought board seats - not today, but shares entitle you to vote on the board members on the next shareholder meeting. And 5$bn of shares buy you a lot of votes.

5$bn may not buy a huge amount of voting power, but if there are close votes on important things then it could be enough to affect the company. Keeping ones enemies closer, regardless of voting, can also help overall.

The likelihood intel AI was going to catch up with efforts like AWS Trainium, let alone Nvidia was already vanishingly small. This gives intel a chance at maintaining leading edge fab technologies.

I feel bad for gamers - I’ve been considering buying a B580 - but honestly the consumer welfare of that market is a complete sidenote.

I don’t agree. OneAPI gets a lot of things right that ROCM doesn’t, simply because ROCM is a 1:1 rip of what nvidia provides (warts and historical baggage included) whereas OneAPI was thoughtfully designed and did away with all of that. Intel has a strong history in networking, much stronger than Xilinx/AMD, and really was the best hope we had for an open standard to replace nvidia’s hellscape.

> This gives intel a chance at maintaining leading edge fab technologies.

I don't think so:

> The chip giant hasn’t disclosed whether it will use Intel Foundry to produce any of these products yet.

It seems pretty likely this is an x86 licensing strategy for nvidia. I doubt they're going to be manufacturing anything on intel fabs. I even wonder if this is a play to get an in with Trump by "supporting" his nationalizing intel strategy.

nvidia doesn’t need x86, they’re moving forward on aarch64 and won’t look back. For example, one of the headlines from CUDA 13 is that sbsa can be targeted from all toolkits, not as a separate download, which is important for making it easy to target grace. They have c2c silicon on grace for native host side nvlink. They’re not looking back.

I think literally just the cash is a big deal at this point. Additionally, this deal probably increases the chances that Nvidia at least uses some Intel Foundry technology (like packing) and maybe very down the road, fabrication.

> The likelihood intel AI was going to catch up with efforts like AWS Trainium, let alone Nvidia

...and yet Nvidia is not gambling with the odds. Intel could have challenged Nvidia on performance-per-dollar or per watt, even if they failed to match performance in absolute terms (see AMD's Zen 1 vs Intel)

You misunderstand enterprise GPUs. Their cost of ownership is dominated by electricity - they're already optimized for price per watt.

The regulators want this because it’s bolstering the last domestic owned fab.

Any down the road repercussions be damned from their perspective.

Intel doesn’t deserve anything. They deserve to disappear based on how they ran the company as a monopoly. No lessons were learned.

That was quite a long time ago! Intel going down the chutes now isn’t an effective punishment for how it behaved under Andy Grove and won’t deter others from Grove-like behaviour. Instead it’ll just mean even less restraint on any of the big players with market power now, like nVidia, AMD and TSMC.

This is likely true in a vacuum, but US national security concerns means the US needs Intel.

This isn't about GPU competition, it's about fab competition (which is in far more dire of a situation).

Intel can no longer fund new process nodes by itself, and no customers want to take the business risk to build their product on a (very difficult) new node when tsmc exists. They're in a chicken and egg situation. (see also https://stratechery.com/2025/u-s-intel/ )

Consumer gpus are totally different products from the high end gpus now. Intel has failed on the gpu market and has effectively zero market share, so it is not actually clear there is an antitrust issue in that market. It would be nice if there was more competition but there are other players like AMD and a long tail of smaller ones

>Consumer gpus are totally different products from the high end gpus now. Intel has failed on the gpu market and has effectively zero market share, so it is not actually clear there is an antitrust issue in that market. It would be nice if there was more competition but there are other players like AMD and a long tail of smaller ones

I'm sorry that's just not correct. Intel is literally just getting started in the GPU market, and their last several releases have been nearly exactly what people are asking for. Saying "they've lost" when the newest cards have been on the market for less than a month is ridiculous.

If they are even mediocre at marketing, the Arc Pro B50 has a chance to be an absolute game changer for devs who don't have a large budget:

https://www.servethehome.com/intel-arc-pro-b50-review-a-16gb...

I have absolutely no doubt Nvidia sees that list of "coming features" and will do everything they can to kill that roadmap.

"Intel getting started in GPU market" is like a chain smoker quitting smoking. It's so easy that they have done it 20 times!

The lastest Arc GPUs were doing good, and were absolutely an option for entry/mid level gamers. I think lack of maturity was one of the main things keeping sales down.

Intel has been making GPUs for over 25 years. Claiming they are just getting started is absurd.

To that point, they've been "just getting started" in practically every chip market other than x86/x64 CPUs for over 20 years now, and have failed miserably every time.

If you think Nvidia is doing this because they're afraid of losing market share, you're way off base.

  224 GB/s

  128 bit

The monkey's paw curls...

I love GPU differentiation, but this is one of those areas where Nvidia is justified shipping less VRAM. With less VRAM, you can use fewer memory controllers to push higher speeds on the same memory!

For instance, both the B50 and the RTX 2060 use GDDR6 memory. But the 2060 has a 192-bit memory bus, and enjoys ~336 GB/s bandwidth because of it.

I don't know what anybody would do with such a weak card.

My RTX 5090 is about 10x faster (measured by FP32 TFLOPS) and I still don't find it to be fast enough. I can't imagine using something so slow for AI/ML. Only 2.2 tokens/sec on an 8B parameter Llama model? That's slower than someone typing.

I get that it's a budget card, but budget cards are supposed to at least win on a pure price/performance ratio, even with a lower baseline performance. The 5090 is 10x faster but only 6-8x the price, depending on where in the $2-3,000 price range you can find one at.

> it is not actually clear there is an antitrust issue in that market

Preempting a (potential) future competitor from entering a market is also an antitrust issue.

Other than the market segmentation over RAM amounts, I don't see very much difference. There's some but there's been some for a long time. Isn't AMD re-unifying their architectures?

> There's some but there's been some for a long time. Isn't AMD re-unifying their architectures?

Yes.

> Other than the market segmentation over RAM amounts, I don't see very much difference.

The difference between CDNA and RDNA is pretty much how fast it can crunch FP64 and SR-IOV. Prior to RDNA, AMD GPUs were jacks of all trades with compute bias. Which made them bad for gaming unless the game is specifically written around async compute. Vega64 has more FP64 compute than the 4080 for context.

I think if AMD was able to get a solid market share of datacenter GPUs, they wouldn't have unified. This feels like CDNA team couldn't justify its existence.

Does Nvidia now have controlling interest? A bunch of board seats?

Why would it matter if not? This is a nice partnership. Each gets something the other lacks.

And it strengthens domestic manufacturing. Taiwan is going to be subumed soon, and we need more domestic production now.

The alternative is currently looking like cutting up of intel into piecemeal to make a quick buck just to stay afloat. The GPU division is not profitable and may be destroyed if overall financials don't improve.

Right now, for the US national interests, our biggest concern is that Intel continues to exist. Intel has been making crappy GPUs for 25 years. They weren’t going to start making great GPUs now.

Besides, who would actually use them if they don’t support CUDA?

Everyone designs better GPUs than Intel - even Apple’s ARM GPUs have been outpacing Intel for a decade even before the M series.

> They weren’t going to start making great GPUs now.

But that's exactly what they started doing with Battlemage? It's competitive in its price range and was showing generational strides.

> Besides, who would actually use them if they don’t support CUDA?

ML is starting to trend away from CUDA towards Vulkan, even on Nvidia hardware, for practical reasons (e.g. performance overhead).

Intel has been trying to make decent GPUs for 25+ years. No company is going to invest billions buying Intel GPUs - especially not the hyper scalers.

Why does it matter if Intel exists if they can't compete? AMD exists. The only point of hoping they remain is to create an environment of competition as that drives development and progress.

Though fair and free markets is not at all what the current regime in the US believes in, instead it will be consolidation, leading waste, and little innovation and progress.

AMD doesn’t have a foundery. They are irrelevant.

NVidia only owns 4% of Intel. They won't be able to dictate it's direction.

Wait what. Intel GPU+AI efforts. People had to come together to fund the abandoned Intel SW development team. Intel GPUs are great at what they do but they are no nvidia. I don't even think that was on the roamdap. Also you don't know what nvidia wants. Maybe they want to flood the low end to destroy AMD benefiting consumers. We just don't know

> For personal computing, Intel will build and offer to the market x86 system-on-chips (SOCs) that integrate NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets. These new x86 RTX SOCs will power a wide range of PCs that demand integration of world-class CPUs and GPUs.

https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1750/...

What’s old is new again: back in 2017, Intel tried something similar with AMD (Kaby Lake-G). They paired a Kaby Lake CPU with a Vega GPU and HBM, but the product flopped: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-discontinue-kaby-lak...

I don't think this is Intel trying to save itself, it's nVidia. Intel GPUs have been in 3rd place for a long time, but their integrated graphics are widely available and come in 2nd place because nVidia can't compete in the x86 space. Intel graphics have been closing the gap with AMD and are now within what? A factor of 2 or less (1.5?)

IMHO we will soon see more small/quiet PCs without a slot for a graphics card, relying on integrated graphics. nVidia has no place in that future. But now, by dropping $5B on Intel they can get into some of these SoCs and not become irrelevant.

The nice thing for Intel is that they might be able to claim graphics superiority in SoC land since they are currently lagging in CPU.

Way back in the mid-late 2000s Intel CPUs could be used with third party chipsets not manufactured by Intel. This had been going on forever but the space was particularly wild with Nvidia being the most popular chipset manufacturer for AMD and also making in-roads for Intel CPUs. It was an important enough market than when ALi introduced AMD chipsets that were better than Nvidia's they promptly bought the company and spun down operations.

This was all for naught as AMD purchased ATi, shutting out all other chipsets and Intel did the same. Things actually looked pretty grim for Nvidia at this point in time. AMD was making moves that suggested APUs were the future and Intel started releasing platforms with very little PCIe connectivity, prompting Nvidia to build things like the Ion platform that could operate over an anemic pcie 1x link. There were really were the beginnings of strategic moves to lock Nvidia out of their own market.

Fortunately, Nvidia won a lawsuit against Intel that required them to have pcie 16x connectivity on their main platforms for 10 years or so and AMD put out non-competitive offerings in the CPU space such that the APU take off never happened. If Intel had actually developed their integrated GPUs or won that lawsuit or if AMD had actually executed Nvidia might well be an also-ran right around now.

To their credit, Nvidia really took advantage of their competitors inability to press their huge strategic advantage during that time. I think we're in a different landscape at the moment. Neither AMD nor Intel can afford boot Nvidia since consumers would likely abandon them for whoever could still slot in an Nvidia card. High performance graphics is the domain of add-in boards now and will be for awhile. Process node shrinks aren't as easy and cooling solutions are getting crazy.

But Nvidia has been shut out of the new handheld market and haven't been a good total package for consoles as SoC both rule the day in those spaces so I'm not super surprised at the desire for this pairing. But I did think nvidia had given up these ambitions was planning to try to build an adjacent ARM based platform as a potential escape hatch.

> It was an important enough market than when ALi introduced AMD chipsets that were better than Nvidia's they promptly bought the company and spun down operations.

This feels like a 'brand new sentence' to me because I've never met an ALi chipset that I liked. Every one I ever used had some shitty quirk that made VIA or SiS somehow more palatable [0] [1].

> Intel started releasing platforms with very little PCIe connectivity,

This is also a semi-weird statement to me, in that it was nothing new; Intel already had an established history of chipsets like the i810, 845GV, 865GV, etc which all lacked AGP. [2]

[0] - Aladdin V with it's AGP Instabilities, MAGiK 1 with it's poor handling of more than 2 or 3 'rows' of DDR (i.e. two double-sided sticks of DDR turned it into a shitshow no matter what you did to timings. 3 usually was 'ok-ish' and 2 was stable.)

[1] - SIS 730 and 735 were great chipsets for the money and TBH the closest to the AMD760 for stability.

[2] - If I had a dollar for every time I got to break the news to someone that there was no real way to put a Geforce or 'Radon' [3] in their eMachine, I could have had a then-decent down payment for a car.

[3] - Although, in an odd sort of foreshadowing, most people who called it a 'Radon', would specifically call it an AMD Radon... and now here we are. Oddly prescient.

nvidia does build SOCs already. The AGXs and other offerings. I'm curious why they want intel despite having that technical capability of building SOCs.

I realize the AGX is more of a low power solution and it's possible that nvidia is still technically limited when building SOCs but this is just speculation.

Does anybody know actual ground truth reasoning why Nvidia is buying Intel despite the fact that nvidia can make their own SOCs?

Nvidia just doesn't care about console and handheld markets. They are unwilling to make customisations and it's low margin business.

Xe2 is superior to current AMD integrated already

I think the comparison was between Nvidia standalone graphics chips and Intel integrated graphics capabilities.

> Intel graphics have been closing the gap with AMD and are now within what? A factor of 2 or less (1.5?)

Apart from that APU(395+) from AMD, intel iGPU is on par with AMD right now.

The 395+ is more like dGPU and CPU on same die.

Intel hasn't had desktop GPUs for a long time. Your timescale is off compared to how long AMD and Nvidia have had to polish their GPUs.

I'm curious, why do you type it as nVidia instead of NVIDIA or Nvidia ?

RIP Arc and Gaudi. There is no other way how to read this. Fewer competitors => higher prices.

I think it is bad news for the GPU market (AMD has had a beachhead with their integrated solution here as they've lost out elsewhere) but good for x86 which I've worried would be greatly diminished as Intel became less competitive.

I just realized there's worse possibility. They might offer it as successor to xx50/60 RTX GPUs to unsupport CUDA on low ends.

Absolutely. This is terrible news for high emission gamers, who have been living under the boot of Nvidia for decades.

That was targeted at supporting more tightly integrated and performant Macbooks .... it flopped because Apple came up with M1, not because it was bad per se.

The ryzen APUs had a rocky start but are properly good now, the concept is sound

apple never shipped a product with that, but it made for an excellent hackintosh

Exactly

To me, this just validates what AMD has been doing for over a decade. Integrated GPUs for personal computing are the way forward.

>They paired a Kaby Lake CPU with a Vega GPU and HBM, but the product flopped.

Not sure if it's flopped, because the only machine with that CPU i could find is the intel nuc.

> What’s old is new again

Let's go back even further.. I get strong nForce vibes from that extract!

Stick some CUDA cores on the CPU and market is for AI?

> Intel tried something similar with AMD (Kaby Lake-G). They paired a Kaby Lake CPU with a Vega GPU and HBM, but the product flopped

/me picturing Khaby Lame gesturing his hands at an obvious workaround.

Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps? This is giving similar vibes. That deal was arguably what saved Apple near its nadir. I’m not a fan of Intel’s past monopolistic practices, but for the sake of sustaining competition in the CPU/GPU market, I hope this deal works out for them even half as well as the MS deal did for Apple.

>Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps? This is giving similar vibes.

Doesn't feel the same because the 1997 investment was arranged by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. He had a long personal relationship with Bill Gates so could just call him to drop the outstanding lawsuits and get a commitment for future Office versions on the Mac. Basically, Steve Jobs at relatively young age of 42 was back at Apple in "founder mode" and made bold moves that the prior CEO Gil Amelio couldn't do.

Intel doesn't have the same type of leadership. Their new CEO is a career finance/investor instead of a "new products new innovation" type of leader. This $5 billion investment feels more like the result of back-channel discussions with the US government where they "politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less restrictions selling chips to China.

> This $5 billion investment feels more like the result of back-channel discussions with the US government where they "politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less restrictions selling chips to China.

Stinks of Mussolini-style Corporatism to me.

This style of classical fascism or economic fascism, or whatever the term is differentiate it from the modern unrelated usage of fascism, being used in the US is a bit unnerving, and it's crazy that it's usually from the Republican party, who claims to espouse free markets.

It also happened under G. W. Bush with banks and auto manufacturers, but the worst offense was under Nixon with his nationalization of passenger rail.

At least with the bank and car manufacturer bailouts the government eventually sold off their stocks, and with the Intel investment the government has non-voting shares, but the government completely controls the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, (the NRPC aka Amtrak) with the board members being appointed by the president of the United States.

We lost 20 independent railroads overnight, and created a conglomerate that can barely function.

Yeah, the thing about the economy is it's too big for one mind to grasp, you need statistics to make sense of it in aggregate.

If you fiddle and concentrate only on the top performers, the bottom falls out. Most of the US economy is still in small companies.

That's how post-WW2 France was actually rebuilt. You could also see big hints of that in the US WW2 economic effort, which couldn't have been done without the Government taking a direct hold of things and instituting central-ish planning.

You try to pin this (hypothetical) as fascism.

Let's assume Trump admin pressured Nvidia to invest in intel.

Chips act (voted by Democrats / Biden) gave Intel up to $7.8 billion of YOUR money (taxes) in form of direct grants.

Was it more of "Mussolini-style corporatism" to you or not?

Except ofc. China has banned Nvidia.

https://www.ft.com/content/12adf92d-3e34-428a-8d61-c91695119...

Microsoft also invested $100M in Borland at the same time.

Investing in Apple and Borland were an counter-anti-trust legal move, keeping the competitors alive, but on life support. This way they could say to the government "yes there is competition".

Google does the same these days by keeping Firefox alive.

I don't think that's an apt comparison, given that Microsoft and Apple were more direct competitors than Intel and Nvidia; the latter have a more symbiotic relationship. I think the rationale is closer to the competitor of my competitor is my friend -- they face two threats by AMD growing larger in the CPU market:

- a bigger R&D budget for their main competitor in the GPU market

- since Nvidia doesn't have their own CPUs, they risk becoming more dependent on their main competitor for total system performance.

> since Nvidia doesn't have their own CPUs, they risk becoming more dependent on their main competitor for total system performance.

This is why they built the Grace CPU - noting that they're using Arm's Neoverse V2 cores rather than their own design.

Here's Nvidia's CPUs, which are increasingly a required part of their data center offerings:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/

Required in that Nvidia would like to sell them to you. But customers seem to be hesitant and prefer x86-based DGX and similar systems. At least from what I've heard and seen.

Nah I have feeling this is part of the result of the arm twisting to be allowed to sell to China.

This is a big ask for a shrinking market- with the pressure that the Chinese government is putting on their domestic companies to not buy H20's, I'm not sure how big this is going to be going forward. 5 billion (plus whatever it costs to build these products) is a lot for a market that is probably going to be closed soon.

It's even more ironic when you remember in 2005 the tables were turned, and Intel was trying to buy Nvidia.

Does intel have someone who will return and change the course of the company or return to its original mission or something of that sort?

Oh, I bet Elon has been handed some ideas.

> Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps?

Had Apple failed, Microsoft would probably have been found to have a clear monopolistic position. And microsoft was already in hot waters due to InternetExplorer IIRC.

Yep. MSFT needed Apple because of Anti-trust issues.

Apples demise wouldve nailed the case.

All they need now is a CEO like Steve Jobs…

Jensen moves to intel …

where / who is intel's steve-jobs ?

Competition?

The reason why Nvidia is buying now does not have to do anything with Arc or GPU competition. There are mainly two reasons.

1) This year, Intel, TSMC, and Samsung announced their latest factories' yields. Intel was the earliest, with 18A, while Samsung was the most recent. TSMC yieled above 60%, Intel below 60%, and Samsung around 50% (but Samsung's tech is basically a generation ahead and technically more precise), and Samsung could improve their yields the most due to the way set up the processes, where 70% is the target. Until last year, Samsung was in the second place, and with the idea that Intel caught up so fast and taking Samsung's position at least for this year, Nvidia bought Intel's stock since it's been getting cheaper since COVID.

2) It's just generally good to diversify into your competitors. Every company does this, especially when the price is cheap.

I am curious where you get your information about Samsung being more “precise”.

I was recently looking into 2nm myself, and based on wikipedia article on 2nm, TSMC 2nm is about 50% more dense than the samsung and intel equivalent. They aren’t remotely the same thing. Samsung 2nm and Intel 18A are about as dense as TSMC 3nm, that’s been in production for years.

>2) It's just generally good to diversify into your competitors. Every company does this, especially when the price is cheap.

This definitely isn't a thing that every company does (or even close to every company).

While #2 is true, there are a myriad of ways to do that without a press release.

> but Samsung's tech is basically a generation ahead and technically more precise

Are you comparing Samsung against Intel here specifically, or also TSMC?

Didn't Japanese camera makers do this and it pushed Olympus' board members to force the selloff of that division?

How do you know Intel 18A yield if this is one of the biggest secrets?

Possibly more curious than the investment:

> Nvidia will also have Intel build custom x86 data center CPUs for its AI products for hyperscale and enterprise customers.

Hell has frozen over at Intel. Actually listening to people that want to buy your stuff, whatever next? Presumably someone over there doesn't want the AI wave to turn into a repeat of their famous success with mobile.

In the event Intel ever do get US based fabrication semi competitive again (and the national security motivation for doing so is intense) nVidia will likely have to be a major customer, so this does make sense. I remain doubtful that Intel can pull it off, and it will have to come from someone else.

If you were a big enough customer you could get a SKU for you, too. E.g. hyperscalers have Xeons which are not available for any other customers for any price.

But what they've completely resisted so far is any non trivial modification.

They turned down Acorn about the 286, which led to Acorn creating the Arm, they have turned down various console makers, they turned down Apple on the iPhone, and so on. In all cases they thought the opportunities were beneath them.

Intel has always been too much about what they want to sell you, not what you need. That worked for them when the two aligned over backwards compat.

Clearly the threat of an Arm or RISC-V finding itself fused to a GPU running AI inference workloads has woken someone up, at last.

> Actually listening to people that want to buy your stuff, whatever next?

This is very likely the new culture that LBT is bringing in. This can only be good.

It was intel culture at one time - when I started, everyone got a card to wear with your badge with intel values, there were only 6 and ‘customer orientation’ was one. It definitely influenced my personal development, but was clearly not adopted equally across the company.

Intel is a strategically important company for the United States. This smells like a token investment to appease the US government. Not saying it’s bad, but very much looks like that.

Only the fab part is. Intel needs to separate the two. Maybe Nvidia, AMD, or Qualcomm can buy the the fab part.

Why would either of these three be interested in buying a fab? The only other large player with its own fab is Samsung and Samsung has the same problem that Intel has, namedly a fab that is nowhere near close to TSMC.

I agree that Intel would be better served to spin off its fab division, a potential buyer could be the US government for military and national security relevant projects.

AMD sold off its foundries, why would they buy some again?

Being fabless is a huge strategic advantage to chip designers. Intel's biggest problem has been that theyre stuck on shitty fabs. Nvidia, amd, and qualcomm do not want to be in that position.

From a business perspective at least it seems slightly pointless to just be another fabless company?

It did cross my mind that it could just be a kind of validation investment, to validate the Trump "investment" in Intel as a smart move (i.e., "see, Nvidia also thinks intel is a good investment), but the announcement did seem a bit contrived for that.

I am also thinking that it may just be more of a "everyone scratching each other's backs." Intel avoids anti-trust/monopoly investigations, Intel is saved for all the institutional and political stakeholders and Nvidia floats an artificial competitor to make them look less like a monopoly, Intel stays alive, etc.

I wonder what this means for Intel's Arc lineup. Would be a bit crazy to have privileged access to a competitor's roadmap through just owning a chunk of them. I also have to admit I really hope they dont cancel them. A triopoly is at least better than a duopoly (or realistically, a monopoly as AMD's competitiveness in gpus is pretty questionable)

It probably kills any prospect of Intel releasing a market disrupter card that many were calling for - a 64GB or 92GB card with even middling performance for under $1k.

It's pretty clear AMD and Nvidia are gatekeeping memory so they can iterate over time and protect their datacenter cards.

Intel had a prime opportunity to blow this up.

That's what I think of, along with favour from their new investment sibling, the US government. AMD doesn't want to be super competitive, they like their margins and being second choice in a hypetastic market. Even though Arc has very low adoption, it was making signs of doing scrappy things, like enabling two 24GB GPUs on one card from third party vendors, which got the hobby/upstart community pretty excited. Ultimately it's not a real market giving the people what they want via competition, it's all contrived by politics and the biggest players.

imho the entire point of this for nvidia is to kill arc

They will not, because need to save at least weak competition, or anti-trust regulators will use very high taxes against Nvidia.

This is reason, why Intel all previous decades saved tiny stripe for competitors (sure, AMD , but also like Cyrix or Sys), but immediately hit brakes, when some competitor becomes too competitive - to show regulators, that market is still competitive, is not just monopoly.

The size of stripe for outsiders is not right parameter here, but more important outsiders will not show bright products in most important niches.

So idea, Arc will not die fast, but it will constantly lag, to be only second or third.

How one could cut wings to GPU? Well first, delay top products, for example installing slow RAM and use too high temperature margins, so chip will run on slower frequency than could.

Second, as I hear, Arc drivers still not ideal and some games don't run smooth.

Third, cut all long term perspective initiatives, like WebGPU.

ps Other examples, you may seen strange behavior of IBM, Commodore/Atari, when they avoid to implement some very obvious things, and that is - they visited by regulators, and warned about approaching of formal margin, and after that visit, hit brakes, to limit their products, to avoid become next ATT.

Which is arguably kind of weird because where is it actually competing with NVIDIA? A hypothetical future, I guess?

But also, does this amount of ownership even give them the ability to kill anything on Intel's roadmap without broad shareholder consensus (not that that's even how roadmaps are handled anyway)?

Also, the US Govt bought $8.9B in stock last month I guess

https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/...

Correction: Renegotiated a prior loan as a $8.9B stock purchase.

Does that mean Intel doesn't ever have to pay it back?

There's a lot of concern in the comments here about what this means for ARC. The size of this investment while large isn't enough to warrant jeopardizing ARC though. Intel has a responsibility to all shareholders, and diminishing ARC would be a bad move for overall shareholder value.

If Nvidia did try to exert any pressure to scrap ARC, that would be both a huge financial and geopolitical scandal. It's in the best interest of the US to not only support Intel's local manufacturing, but also it's GPU tech.

Could they use nvidia ip for the future arc line?

I can think of _nothing_ with a better shot at unseating nvidia than a merger with intel. Fingers crossed for ever closer union between the two.

You can't be serious.

Intel was well on its way to be a considerable threat to NVIDIA with their Arc line of GPUs, which are getting better and cheaper with each generation. Perhaps not in the enterprise and AI markets yet, but certainly on the consumer side.

This news muddies this approach, and I see it as a misstep for both Intel and for consumers. Intel is only helping NVIDIA, which puts them further away from unseating them than they were before.

Competition is always a net positive for consumers, while mergers are always a net negative. This news will only benefit shareholders of both companies, and Intel shareholders only in the short-term. In the long-term, it's making NVIDIA more powerful.

I'm not convinced. The latest Battlemage benchmarks I've seen put the B580 at the same performance as the RTX 4060 (which is a two years old entry-level card) but with 50% more power consumption (80W vs 125W average). It's good to have more than one open source supporting graphics vendor, but I don't think Nvidia is losing any sleep over Intel's GPU offerings.

Battlemage had the best perf/% and most the driver issues from Alchemist had been ironed out. Another generation or two of steady progress and intel have a big winner on their hands.

Intel's foundry costs are probably competitive with nvidia too - nvidia has too much opportunity cost if nothing else.

The B580 was released in December 2024, and the 4060 in May 2023. So not quite a two year difference.

While it doesn't quite compete at performance and power consumption, it does at price/performance and overall value. It is a $250 card, compared to the $300 of the 4060 at launch. You can still get it at that price, if there's stock, while the 4060 hovers around $400 now. It's also a 12GB card vs the 8GB of the 4060.

So, sure, this is not competitive at the high-end segment, but it's remarkable what they've accomplished in just a few years, compared to the decades that AMD and NVIDIA have on them. It's definitely not far fetched to assume that the gap would only continue to close.

Besides, Intel is not only competing at GPUs, but APUs, and CPUs. Their APU products are more performant and efficient than AMD's (e.g. 140V vs 890M).

I'm sure Larrabee will be superb any year now. The Xeon phi will rise again. For supporting evidence, the success of Aurora. Weren't the loss-leading arc GPUs cancelled as well? Maybe that only one generation of them, it does look like some are on the market now.

I think this partnership will damage nvidia. It might damage intel, but given they're circling the drain already, it's hard to make matters worse.

It's probably bad for consumers in every dimension.

Or to take the opposite, if nvidia rolled over intel and fired essentially everyone in the management chain and started trying to run the fabs themselves, good chance they'd turn the ship around and become even more powerful than they already are.

Mergers where one company is on the verge of failing can be a net positive for consumers. Most obviously this happens when banks fail and people’s bank cards still work etc and at least initially the branches stay open.

Intel isn’t at that point, but the companies trajectory isn’t looking good. I’d happily sacrifice ARC to keep a duopoly in CPU’s.

> This news muddies this approach, and I see it as a misstep for both Intel and for consumers.

Consumers still have AMD as an alternative for very decent and price attractive GPUs (and CPUs).

The consumer gpu market is a rounding error compared to enterprise AI. And Intel is zero threat to Nvidia there.

They aren’t merging - this is Nvidia ensuring their tech is in Intel chips.

Might rather see it the other way around - Nvidia getting license to create products with x86(_64) CPUs integrated in the silicon. Nvidia are the big boy in this transaction and they'll get what they want out of it. But I can see the attraction for Intel.

Yes indeed. It's still a step in that direction that opens up a bunch of communication channels between the execs of the two companies. Things move slowly.

Could AMD argue that Intel's licence agreement for x86-64 is at risk since it requires that Intel (and AMD) may not change hands?

No, why?

I hope this isn't "Shut-up" money to end ARC gpu development. i have an A770, i am very happy with it.

It's absolutely not, the ARC line is not a threat in any way to nVidia, it's to get it's feet into the CPU market without the initial setup costs and research it would take to start from scratch.

They will be dominating AMD now on both fronts if things go smoothly for them.

> It is unclear if Intel will issue new stock for Nvidia to purchase

Erm, a rather important point to bury down the story. The fiest question on anyone’s lips will be is this $5bn to build new chip technology, or $5bn for employees to spend on yachts?

It’s the most important part of the story. It’s so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this. Why hold stock in Intel if the only people that ever buy the real stock and create buy pressure are the plebs? Here is the previous time…

> Intel stock experienced dilution because the U.S. government converted CHIPS Act grants into an equity stake, acquiring a significant ownership percentage at a discounted price, which increased the total number of outstanding shares and reduced existing shareholders' ownership percentage, according to The Motley Fool and Investing.com. This led to roughly 11% dilution for existing shareholders

> It’s so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this.

To get money from the outside, you either have to take on debt or you have to give someone a share in the business. In this case, the board of directors concluded the latter is better. I don't understand why you think it is gross.

> It’s so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this.

Intel is up 30% pre market on this news so I think the existing shareholders will be fine.

About 16 years ago, Intel was considered an ugly monopoly that Nvidia didn't like [0]. It seems as if they have switched sides now.

[0]: <https://www.fudzilla.com/6882-nvidia-continues-comic-campaig...>

they need domestic chip capabilities

This really wasn't a surprise, nVidia has seemed to be itching for a meaningful entry to the CPU market and when intel's CEO started undoing all and any future investment in the company it was clear everything was being setup for a sell off.

5 Billion is just a start but this is a gift for nVidia to eventually squire intel.

I think if Nvidia wanted to acquire Intel, they would acquire Intel.

Intel has never been so cheap relative to the kinds of IP assets that Nvidia values and probably will not be ever again if this and other investments keep it afloat.

Trump's FTC would not block.

You write with proper case-sensitivity for their titles which suggests some historic knowledge of the two. They have been very close partners on CPU+GPU for decades. This investment is not fundamentally changing that.

The current CEO is more like a CFO--cutting costs and eliminating waste. There are two exits from that: sell off, as you say, and re-investment in the products of most likely future profit. This could be a signal that the latter is the plan and that the competitive aspects of the nVidia-intel partnership will be sidelined for a while.

nVidia has also been licensing their GPU IP to MediaTek recently, who are working on a 2nd generation of a SoC that combines their ARM cores with nVidia GPUs now, catering to e.g. the automotive market.

Looks like using GPU IP to take over other brands' product lines is now officially an nVidia strategy.

I guess the obvious worry here is whether Intel will continue development of their own dGPUs, which have a lovely open driver stack.

Unless Nvidia outright absorbs intel I think Intel would have to be kind of crazy to stop developing GPUs.

So long as the AI craze is hanging in there it feels like having that expertise and IP is going to have high potential upside.

I'd agree, but Intel has also halted dGPU development efforts before, cf. the canned Larrabee project. Which was more troubled on the technology side however.

Seems Nvidia needs an alternative to MediaTek or wants to pressure MediaTek given the announcement of x86 Intel/Nvidia SoCs and the delay of DGX Spark, GB10 and N1X.

They wanted to launch DGX Spark early summer and it's nowhere to be seen, while strix halo is shipping in over 30+ SKUs from all major manufacturers.

I'm guessing NVidia didn't do this by choice. Propping up Intel doesn't seem in their best interests, nor does it do their share holders any favors by diluting their rapid growth.

There's some case for self-interest – propping up another fab etc. – but I do wonder how much of it is USG. (The economic case for Intel integrating Nvidia silicon on-chip doesn't too much sense to me: there's no growth potential in commodity/consumer x86, and maybe they can shove their new integrated Nvidia in front of enterprise buyers, but I'd be a dubious re: ROI.)

Bullshit

https://www.techpowerup.com/341137/nvidias-usd-5b-intel-inve...

> I'm guessing NVidia didn't do this by choice. Propping up Intel doesn't seem in their best interests

In a top-down oligarchy, their best interests are served by focusing on the desires of the great leader, in contrast to a competitive bottom-up market economy, where they would focus on the desires of customers and shareholders.

Called it. I knew Nvidia had nowhere left to go, with that insanely high valuation, other than to start buying competitors and adjacent companies. I don't think this is the end, either.

Link to your comment? I am curious to read it.

After the arm buyout fell through, I guess this is the next best thing. Plus a good deal for nvidia since Intel is pretty desperate at this point.

Nvidia sees the forest of the trees. The consequences of the US government buying steaks and Intel are that there will be Federal requirements for us companies using Intel. This is entirely about the foundry business. Nvidia is at risk when 100% of the production of its intellectual property occurs in Taiwan. They're more interested than anyone else in diversifying their foundry solutions. Intel has just been a terrible partner and totally disregards its customers. It's only because of the new strategic need for the US to have a foundry business that the government is saving until. NVIDIA is understandably supportive of this.

NVDA stock is up 3.5% so far today, which is ~$150B, or slightly more than one Intel. $5B is pocket change in comparison.

Except that Nvidia, Inc. doesn't own any of that NVDA stock, other people do, and they cannot access that money. Nvidia, Inc. owns net profit, which is orders of magnitude less than market cap. Last year's net profit was just under $73 billion. ($5 billion is still very affordable, too be sure).

So AMD got ATI, and now NVidia gets Intel.

Difference is, AMD wasn't a competitor for ATi. One mostly built CPU's, while another- GPUs. These two, on the other hand, are competing in several major product categories. Overall, not a good look

Fitting. Then you used to bolt a GPU to a computer. These days you bolt a computer to a GPU.

Great news for all involved. It also would seem to validate Apple’s unified architecture for inference, and imply AMD is getting close…

You mean AMD's unified architecture. They were a founder of the HSA Foundation that drove innovation in this space complete with Linux kernel investments and unified compute SDKs, and they had the first shipping hardware support.

It feels like the end is in sight for dedicated graphics chips in consumer devices. Phones, consoles, and now Apple silicon are proving that SoC designs with unified memory and focused thermals are a winning strategy for efficiency and speed. Nvidia may be happy enough to move the graphics strategy onto an SoC and keep discrete boards just for AI.

Yet here I am just frothing for GPUs

Yes for efficiency, not for speed.

IFS Bottleneck means; NVIDIA buys time, Intel loses it and Blackwell ultra slips. RISC-V (Tenstorrent) + AMD ROCm keep the pipeline moving while NVIDIA polishes it's hammer. Lesson; Adage (Old Norse inspired)

“Hamarr klofnaði, er vé fann eigi leið; Spjót fló, en skjár var eigi bundinn.”

Translation back to English

“The hammer split, when craft found not its path; The spear flew forth, yet screen was never bound.”

This mirrors the original iambic pentameter adage, but cast in skaldic-styled compactness, tying the hammer (Mjölnir) to the broken driver/kernel path, and the spear (Gungnir) to the unpatched Wayland/X11 display stack. Something like Snorri Sturlosson might've slipped into the prose Edda? except it's about GPUs and Linux drivers.

I know AMD used to be lacking but these days I guess they're probably the go-to on Linux because they share changes with the community

I don't like the idea of using Intel given their lack of disclosure for Spectre/Meltdown and some of their practices (towards AMD)

SemiAccruate reported that NVidia had been dipping its toes into manufacturing its products using Intel's fabs several months ago, I'd assume that that's related.

NVIDIA has started integrating NVLink with the x86 CPU ecosystem. It's possible that NVLink will overcome CXL in this competition, just as CUDA once defeated OpenCL.

The irony here is that Intel once tried to buy Nvidia for $20B, but Intel's board rejected the deal as "too expensive" and Intel should build its own GPUs.

People have been talking about the concentration of risk in popular indices, now large caps are buying each other's stakes? Intel's stock is up 27% today..

No way this doesn't get blocked by antitrust. This will make them way too large and Intel is already trying to sell off (US govt bought $10B couple weeks ago)

The government is the one pushing this deal. They won't block it.

> No way this doesn't get blocked by antitrust

That action may cease to exist soon, especially after Vance is POTUS and the courts stacked with Peter Thiel loyalists that back his vision of anti-competition. Bet on it.

USG's far more interested in (scare quotes intentional) "AI dominance", and pushing American tech to fuse to do so – damn the consumer.

who's running antitrust these days

AMD is much stronger in unified memory architectures than Nvidia at this point. It kinda makes sense, with the AI push.

I wonder what this means for the ARC line of GPUs?

Exactly what Buffett put into Bank of America in 2011. Not sure what that means, but. . . data points:

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffe...

Are we getting a new iteration of sub-$200 mini PCs with an RTX chiplet?! That would be an amazing replacement for my N100!

INTC is strategically important company. They won't be allowed to fail. Of course, that doesn't mean the stock is a good investment. During the GFC, all the equity holders were wiped out all the bond holders got all their money back. Figure that one out.

That's quite literally why bonds are bonds and equity is equity...

Intel should never have existed in the first place. We should have gone the RISC route in the 80s and 90s and it took 30 years for the world to realize that with ARM. It’s like we’re continuously resuscitating a zombie to terrorize us, instead of just letting it die.

What's the significance of $5B of stock? Does that mean controlling share in Intel?

It’s a corporate engagement ring.

Article mentions it amounts to ~5% ownership

No, but it's still a big stake from the largest player in semis. You wouldn't expect a move like that if they didn't see an opportunity there.

I would assume not given their market cap.

It's written in the article that the $5B represents about 5% of Intel stock outstanding.

No idea what to think of this. I don't want Intel to die, but what will this do to their GPU business they're competing with NVIDIA on. And at worst this leads to even more consolidation

Almost 15% of Intel is now owned between the US govt. and NVidia.

Microsoft bailing out Apple vibes.

This time around Nvidia should HOLDL the stock

I'm mixed on this, only because when they've done similar hybrid chips with AMD GPUs in the past the support has been poor and dropped off rather quickly.

I'm very pessimistic about this. Goodbye to those nice, budget-friendly intel GPUs. nGreedia is going to continue selling 8 gig cards to consumers forever.

> Nvidia announced that it will buy $5 billion in Intel common stock at $23.28 per share, representing a roughly 5% ownership stake in Intel. (Intel stock is now up 33% in premarket trading.)

Why/how is INTC premarket up from $24.90 around 30% (to $32), when Nvidia is buying the stock at $23.28 ? Who is selling the stock?

I suppose the Intel board decided this? Why did they sell under the current market price? Didn't the Intel board have fiduciary duty to get as good a price from Nvidia as possible? If Nvidia buying stock moves it up so much, it seems like a bad deal to sell the stock for so little.

It's typical in these situations that the price per stock is negotiated, with current SP as a starting point. It's fairly unusual, I think, for the company selling stock to get a price significantly higher than market price. It's more typical that there's a slight discount. At least that's been the case for every stock I owned where dilution has occured. We also don't know yet when exactly this deal was negotiated and approved, so it's hard to actually say. Considering where INTC has been very recently(below $20), $23.28 seems very reasonable to me.

The reason the stock surged up past $30 is the general market's reaction to the news, and subsequent buying pressure, not the stock transaction itself. It seems likely that once the exuberance cools down, the SP will pull back, where to I can't say. Somewhere between $25 and $30 would be my bet, but this is not financial advice, I'm just spitballing here.

I would say it's basically a bailout.

Probably government-mandated.

NVIDIA should probably have spent $5B on manure instead…

They probably assume Intel is more similar to them in skill and execution than what’s reality…

How to buy out competition, kill their product offerings, and further your own market dominance without improving your own product.

I'm taking this investment as a validation of the competitiveness of AMD's APUs & Apple's Silicon.

smart move for nvidia, as amd is the true competitor, keeping using amd's cpu will just help to build up a competitor fast. also this helps intel to figure out its foundry business and it might work someday, which also benefits nvidia as now its only choice is tsmc.

This is Nvidia bribing Intel to not compete with it. This is lousy for everyone.

Grandma smiling from heaven

Wasn't Nvidia working on their own CPU design? Will they drop that?

They're shipping arm derived cpus and have been for years.

Nana can stop spinning in her grave now, i think he just broke even....

Why there is no antitrust involved? this I think can affect AMD.

So that's probably it for the dedicated Intel GPUs. :/

I won't trust Nvidia not doing it for nefarious purposes.

explains why lspci queries integrated NVIDIA graphics.

bit of bearish market given 1bn is equivalent to a 1% stake in one of the largest chip manifactuers on the face of the world

Nowadays I always wonder to what extent such deals are actually driven by market considerations and to what extent it's catering to the Trump administration. Token investments into this state enterprise named Intel seems to be a practical way to cater goodwill with the autocrats.

For a moment I read the title as Nvidia buys Intel for $5B

This is the start of a state orchestrated AI war economy.

This is the first step that Nvidia takes to devour Intel.

Apple is so glad to be out of the Intel hellhole,

Intel will soon say, "Et tu, Brute?"

I think trump told nvidia to buy those shares

5B is a fairly tiny stake (Intel's market cap is around 120B), other than the "we're now working together" signal, why is this news?

In terms of voting stock, they become the biggest owner after US Commerce Department.

As customer they get better access to Intel Foundry and can offload some capacity from TSMC.

tbf, If I were Nvidia and antitrust wasn't an issue I'd be tempted to buy the whole thing.

Intel has a market cap just 2.5% of NVDA, so you could give away just 2.5% of your stock to buy the entirety of Intel. It's bonkers.

Isn't 5% somewhat significant chunk? I really wouldn't call it tiny one. Maybe not even small anymore.

This is a technology forum first and foremost. I know it might not look that way given the recent flood of political activism articles. But, in the technology field, this is pretty big news. This stake makes Nvidia one of Intel's biggest shareholders.

It's a good deal for Nvidia, because custom x86 server CPUs have optimization potential for AI computing clusters, which matters now that Nvidia has competitors that they didn't just 2 years ago. I think that the next several years of Nvidia will be ones of fending off growing competition.

They basically baked in a massive investment profit into the deal. When you factor in the stock jump since this announcement, Nvidia has already made billions.

Market cap was closer to 90B before this deal was announced

Looks like I sold my Intel too soon!

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

best news i've heard in days

Man, talk about tables turning.

Strategically this is good for the US and the West. Intel needs to survive because they have the only advanced fabs that aren't within reach of China.

But as a consumer, I hate this. Intel APUs have become quite good and are great for Linux users. I don't want Nvidia's bullshit infecting them. Jenson wants to be the Apple of chips and we'll all be worse off if Nvidia SoCs become ubiquitous.

Like a tech Völuspa?

Precursor to full acquisition perhaps...also maybe Jensen play to Trump a bit in this.

If there’s a time to do it, now would be the time with the current administration looking at all the regulatory blowback.

If you wanted to acquire Intel you'd do it now. Maybe Intel's future products are garbage and they do worse - but the upside seems pretty high otherwise. This seems like a bit of a firesale price to acquire an advanced fab and CPU maker. Sure, it's Intel and they haven't been doing great, but companies with solid reliable outlooks don't trade this cheaply.

Ofc I would kind of hope/expect antitrust to object given that Intel makes both GPUs and CPUs, and Nvidia is/has dipped their toes into CPU production as well.

It would be 100% Trump to have Nvidia buy Intel and then announce how good of an investment decision he made by buying a slice of intel.

USA, where the federal government is picking winners and losers by making risky stock bets with public money.

Give up 0.1% of shares to get 5% of Intel.

Seems to be an easy bet, if for no other reason than to make the US Government (Trump) happy. Trump gets to tout his +30% return on investment.

Capitalism, all at the hands of just a bunch of people.

Intel dead.

So USA now owns 10% of Intel

Did we make $500 Million off this?

Do we own 10% of Nvidia too? Or is that coming soon?

Hard to keep up with the now acceptable socialism

I for one am happy that our capitalist overlords have finally shredded the last remnants of the pretense, but it probably causes a lot of issues for economists who have to explain why this is all fine and definitely normal.

NVIDIA is Jensen Huang life, and he is probably the best CEO in the USA. But he should be careful. Possible Shareholders lawsuits come with Discovery. NVIDIA sales to Coreweave for example, a company they have shares on is starting to look a lot like self-dealing.

Also, since this Intel deal makes no sense for NVIDIA, a good observer would notice that lately, he seems to spend more time on Air Force One than with NVIDIA teams. The leak of any evidence, showing this was an investment ordered by the White House, will make his company hostage of future demands from the current corrupt administration. The timing is already incredibly suspicions.

We will know for sure he become a hostage, if the next NVIDIA investment is on World Liberty Financial.

"Anatomy of Two Giant Deals: The U.A.E. Got Chips. The Trump Team Got Crypto Riches." - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/politics/trump-uae-chi...

Bullshit

https://www.techpowerup.com/341137/nvidias-usd-5b-intel-inve...

The entire AI ecosystem that is being built out looks very suspect frankly..

This has been an interesting 1.5 months for Intel on all fronts. I wonder how long this deal was in the making, since the timing is impeccable, looking at the current administration's involvement with Intel.

Any chance this move gives $INTC some legs long term?

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