As agentic AI surges, CPUs and air-cooled infrastructure move to the fore
Agents are turning up the heat for enterprises, turning air-cooled AI infrastructure into a boardroom priority.
While GPUs have largely dominated the AI conversation, CPUs are increasingly coming into focus. Agentic AI relies on constant orchestration, data processing, and decision-making between tasks — work that plays to the CPU’s strengths, not the GPU’s. The math alone is staggering, and agentic AI is only making it more demanding, according to Robert Hormuth (pictured, right), corporate vice president of architecture and strategy for the Data Center Solutions Group at Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
“Agentic AI is very goal-oriented. You ask it to achieve a goal, and it’s going to use every tool, every software, everything in the book to go achieve that goal,” Hormuth said. “One of those might be querying a GPU to get a complex math equation, but the rest of it is planning, checking, kicking off tools, verification and iterating. There’s just a lot of work to do around the complex math that the foundational model might return. There’s just a lot more going on in the world of agentic. That’s one of the big kickers right now for CPU demand.”
