Jensen Huang wants you to know that era is over. The Nvidia CEO has been laying out a vision where computing stops retrieving and starts generating, producing custom outputs in real time based on what users actually need rather than pointing them toward something that already exists.
From lookup tables to AI factories
Huang has framed this as perhaps the most significant shift in computing paradigms since the industry’s inception. In a March interview with Lex Fridman and at Nvidia’s GTC conference, he detailed how this transition demands entirely new categories of hardware. GPUs remain central, but the ecosystem now requires purpose-built CPUs designed specifically for AI workloads.
Enter the Nvidia Vera CPU, engineered for what the company calls “agentic AI,” systems that don’t just respond to prompts but reason, plan, and act with increasing autonomy. Early sales of the Vera CPU have reportedly hit $20 billion in 2026, a number that suggests enterprise appetite for this kind of silicon is anything but theoretical.
Huang sees a total addressable market of $200 billion for specialized AI-agent CPUs alone. That’s not the whole AI infrastructure pie. That’s just the CPU slice of it.
