According to a recent Reuters report, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has hinted at broader ambitions for the Arm-based CPU within the GB10 Grace Blackwell chip, developed in collaboration with MediaTek. During an investor presentation, Huang alluded to plans for the new desktop CPU by saying, “You know, obviously we have plans.” However, he also added that he would “wait to tell [us]” the details. Cryptic as it may be, this message — combined with Nvidia’s recent developments — could mean Nvidia might have serious plans for the CPU market.
Huang also noted that MediaTek, the chip’s co-developer, has its own aspirations. “They could provide [the CPU] to us, or they could keep it for themselves and serve the market. It was a great win-win,” Huang said, suggesting MediaTek might market the chip independently.
At CES 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang introduced Project Digits, a cutting-edge $3,000 desktop AI supercomputer tailored for home enthusiasts and researchers. Despite its compact size, comparable to a Mac mini, the device delivers an impressive 1 PFLOPS (petaFLOPS, which means one 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second) of FP4 floating-point performance, making it a powerful tool for running AI models and workloads.
Project Digits draws inspiration from Nvidia’s DGX 100 server design and is powered by the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip made in collaboration with Arm. The chip features 20 high-performance cores, 128GB of LPDDR5X memory, and a 4TB NVMe solid-state drive (SSD), ensuring robust processing capabilities and substantial storage for demanding AI tasks.
The company emphasized the innovation behind the Grace Blackwell chip, with Ashish Karandikar, Nvidia’s vice president of SoC Products, stating that its partnership with Arm has paved the way for transformative AI solutions. He highlighted the chip’s role in enabling the next generation of advancements in artificial intelligence.
Project Digits itself is not intended as a mass-market product but as a $3,000 Linux-based PC tailored for AI developers. However, speculation about Nvidia entering the consumer CPU market has been circulating since October 2023, when Reuters reported that Nvidia and AMD were working on Arm-based chips for a planned 2025 launch.
With Qualcomm gaining traction in the Windows-on-Arm space last year with its Snapdragon X series CPUs, there remains an opportunity — and demand — for more powerful consumer-grade Arm chips. By the look of it, Nvidia, or its partner, MediaTek, could potentially fill this gap and establish a strong foothold in the market.
