Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) shares jumped 5% on Friday following Intel's strong results, lifting the entire semiconductor sector.
Intel's Q1 results showed that the demand for CPUs from AI service providers surpassed expectations, with the company selling chips it had previously written off. Intel's stock skyrocketed 24% to $83, boosting its market cap above $416 billion and exceeding the dot-com bubble peak of 2000.
The growth has spread across the entire chip sector: AMD jumped 14%, while Arm surged over 13%. This growth reflects the rising market confidence that inference—the process by which AI systems respond to user queries—could bring central processors back into a more prominent role after years of graphics chips dominating AI training tasks.
Nvidia's market cap at $5 trillion made it the largest driver in dollar terms on Friday. Notably, Nvidia introduced a new central processor last month, marking a rare expansion into territory traditionally dominated by Intel and AMD.
The company launched the Grace CPU in 2023—a processor based on ARM, designed to work alongside its GPUs in the Grace Hopper and Grace Blackwell superchips to reduce bottlenecks in data processing for AI tasks.
At GTC 2026, Nvidia unveiled the Vera CPU with a custom Olympus core and spatial multithreading technology, which, according to the company, delivers twice the efficiency compared to traditional x86 processors for agent-based AI tasks.