Looking back · SecondSource deep dive, October 15

AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, Arm show CPU racks; no buyer is public

The CPU racks for running AI agents shown at the October 12 Open Compute summit came from four companies, AMD, NVIDIA, Intel and Arm, and those products were announced before the summit. OCP is the organization where data-center operators and hardware makers write open server specifications together, and October 12 was its annual summit. SecondSource's October 13 issue said two companies; the October 15 deep dive corrected that to four (SecondSource deep dive, 2026-10-15). Arm announced its AGI CPU in March. In April, Meta signed a multiyear deal with AWS worth billions of dollars for tens of millions of Graviton5 cores. Buyers already buy CPU cores, but as cloud capacity rather than whole racks. When the deep dive was written, no buyer had publicly purchased whole racks, and AMD's Helion rack doesn't ship until November. The public readings are all single cases or vendor-run tests. SemiAnalysis reported that a 48 MW CPU-and-storage building at Microsoft's Fairwater campus supports a 295 MW GPU cluster, without breaking out the CPU share. Arm's per-rack test was done by Signal65, a testing firm Arm commissioned, so it isn't independent. All figures in this item are carried over from the October 15 deep dive; SemiAnalysis's original report hasn't been reviewed for this issue. The October 15 deep dive's reading is that near-term share in this layer follows who can deliver CPU cores in volume. How we checked →

Concept illustration: four black server racks stand in a row on a long brick-red platform. The panels at the top of the racks are lettered AMD, NVIDIA, intel and arm, and each rack is joined by a short line to a white plate above it reading AMD, NVIDIA, INTEL and ARM, while a white plate reading OCP is joined by a short line to the middle of the platform. In the bottom left and bottom right corners are two dark-haired people in dark clothing, seen from behind and facing the racks.

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 23, 2026, alongside 6 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, Arm show CPU racks; no buyer is public." https://secondsource.io/en/news/2026-10-23-4/. Accessed access date.