Nvidia’s CPU Ambition Goes Nuclear: Vera Beats Intel by 55% as Huang Lays Out a $150 Billion Taiwan Strategy

Nvidia’s new Vera central processor has clocked a 55% performance advantage over Intel’s flagship Xeon 6980P in independent benchmarks, vaulting the company from GPU specialist to a genuine threat in the server CPU market. The chip, built around 88 custom “Olympus” cores and equipped with 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth, delivered 1.5 to 1.6 times the throughput of Nvidia’s own Grace CPU — enough for chief financial officer Colette Kress to peg the division’s revenue potential at $20 billion annually.

Yet the same week that Vera’s numbers leaked, Nvidia’s stock shed 2.19% to close at €181.40 in Frankfurt on Friday, a decline that underscores the gap between the company’s operational momentum and the market’s near-term mood. The shares now sit 9.77% below their €201.05 record and 6.08% beneath the 50-day moving average, though they remain 12.95% above the 200-day line.

The Vera triumph is only one piece of a sweeping platform strategy that stretches far beyond data-center accelerators. At the upcoming GTC Taipei event on June 1, Nvidia is expected to unveil an ARM-based processor for Windows PCs, internally code-named N1 or N1X. Built on TSMC’s 3-nanometer node and pairing a Blackwell GPU with up to 6,144 CUDA cores, the chip would go head-to-head with Apple’s M5 Pro and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite. The teaser campaign began on May 29, when Nvidia and Microsoft jointly posted cryptic coordinates pointing to the Taipei Music Center alongside the slogan “A new era of PC.”

That hardware push is being matched by an extraordinary geographic bet. Chief executive Jensen Huang formally announced “Nvidia Constellation” on May 27 — a $1.27 billion overseas headquarters in Taipei’s Beitou-Shilin Technology Park that will eventually house around 10,000 employees. Construction is slated to begin this summer, with full operations targetted for 2030. Huang’s broader commitment is even larger: annual spending in Taiwan is expected to climb from roughly $15 billion to $150 billion. “AI work needs power,” he warned, calling the island the “epicenter” of the AI revolution and stressing the need for reliable energy infrastructure to support the planned network of AI factories.

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The Taiwan offensive comes as Nvidia walks a careful line on China. On May 28, Huang joined the advisory board of Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management, a panel chaired by Apple’s Tim Cook and including Elon Musk and Satya Nadella. The move — coming just weeks after Huang accompanied President Trump on a visit to Beijing and amid tight US export controls on Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips — is widely seen as an effort to keep diplomatic and academic channels open. The result on the ground is stark: Nvidia’s share of China’s AI accelerator market has collapsed to near zero.

Back in the US, the company’s capital-return machine is running at full throttle. The board authorised an additional $80 billion share buyback programme and raised the quarterly dividend to $0.25 a share, a more than twentyfold increase from the previous level. That firepower is underpinned by a record first quarter: revenue surged 85% year on year to $81.6 billion, with the data-center segment contributing $75.2 billion.

A small insider sale on May 27 drew some attention — director John Dabiri disposed of 625 shares at $214 apiece, netting roughly $133,750 — but the transaction was conducted under a pre-arranged trading plan adopted in December 2025, and Dabiri still holds 14,163 shares directly. Technical analysts see immediate support near $200 and resistance around $215.

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The next catalyst arrives at Computex Taipei, where Huang is set to detail the “Vera Rubin” and “Grace Blackwell” platforms that will extend Nvidia’s compute architecture across CPUs, GPUs, and beyond. Until then, the market appears content to let the stock consolidate: a 48.69% gain over twelve months is hardly a disappointment, but the twin pressures of geopolitical uncertainty in China and the sheer scale of Nvidia’s own capital commitments have introduced a note of caution that even Vera’s 55% lead over Intel could not erase.

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