Gamers who coveted Nvidia’s graphics cards long ago because they rendered computer games beautifully may soon be eyeing Windows computers that plug that technology right into the laptop’s brain.
Nvidia’s latest effort to diversify from the monumentally successful business of selling chips for artificial-intelligence (AI) servers is to offer consumers and businesses an alternative to notebooks with ‘Intel inside.’ It is a smart hedge for Nvidia. Whether these computers will be a smart buy for consumers is far less certain.
Nvidia plans to offer machines built by the likes of Lenovo, HP and Dell that are better adapted to running AI-powered software and agents. Nvidia calls its new RTX Spark a ‘superchip’ because it fuses two things into one package: a CPU, the brain that runs a personal computer, and a GPU, the graphics engine Nvidia originally built for video games that turned out to be so good at AI that it now powers data centres.
Shares of Intel declined by as much as 7.3% in early Monday trading after the announcement by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the Computex technology show in Taiwan.
On the face of it, Huang is not only expanding his sphere of influence in the global chip market, but savvily hedging his bets on where AI demand will go. Nvidia’s $5 trillion market valuation has long had the whiff of a gamble because so much revenue is dependent on just a handful of large customers.
For fiscal year 2026, for instance, one customer accounted for 22% of Nvidia’s total sales and another for 14%, meaning two buyers brought in more than a third of turnover.
Nvidia does not name these customers in its filings, but they are likely companies such as Foxconn, which assemble systems for hyperscalers like Microsoft and Amazon.
Now Nvidia can also capture business at the so-called edge of the AI business, by pitching its technology to end users like you and me. Lenovo, HP and Dell, three of the manufacturers Nvidia will sell its chips to, account for roughly two-thirds of worldwide PC shipments.
If the new venture does not work out, Nvidia still has the 4% stake in Intel that it recently bought. That particular hedge was worthwhile because while Nvidia has years of experience building inputs for consumer machines from its days making graphics cards for gamers, it does not have a strong track record building the brains of personal computers.
Most laptops today run on chips made by Intel or AMD, which are relatively thirsty for power. Chips based on Arm’s technology, the kind found in smartphones and Apple’s Macs, are famed instead for sipping less energy and being gentler on battery life.
But the GPUs that Nvidia makes for data centres are notoriously energy intensive. That, and their price tag, have made AI build-ups extremely costly for labs like OpenAI and Anthropic and hyperscalers such as Microsoft.
It is hard to see how successful a laptop can be if it is running AI agents or whizzy features in Adobe Photoshop but dies within a few hours. Nvidia’s RTX Spark, though, is built on Arm’s energy efficient blueprints, suggesting it might power laptops in an energy saving way too. At least, that is the idea.
Nvidia is touting “the most efficient PC chip ever built” and promises “all-day” battery life, but has not shared figures for energy-intensive tasks like gaming or running AI agents. The company only says that it will release more performance metrics closer to when its chip goes to market this autumn, and that they are “roughly equivalent” to its RTX 5070 graphics chip for laptops.
Is the RTX 5070 graphics chip efficient? Not especially. If pushed hard with a game, it has been known to drain a laptop’s battery life. And Nvidia would not give further details on how the new RTX Spark superchip compares to those from the competition. That leaves an open question which could come back to bite later this year if independent testing shows laptops with an Nvidia brain are a power vacuum.
This will not be Nvidia’s first run at the market for PC processors. More than a decade ago, Nvidia’s Tegra chips powered Microsoft’s first Windows-on-Arm device, a tablet with a detachable keyboard called the Surface RT. But the device could not run a range of third-party apps like Google Chrome, Photoshop and many PC games because most of those programs were designed to run on Intel-style chips and not on Arm’s.
These days, chips based on Arm’s designs have a built-in translator that can run many more programs, which is a promising step forward even if software compatibility for the RTX Spark is still unclear. The bigger question now is whether Nvidia can deliver all that power without battery life paying the price. ©Bloomberg
The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology.