Will the CPU become the new Holy Grail of artificial intelligence?
Will the CPU become the new Holy Grail of artificial intelligence?
Publish Date: 2026-05-19 10:20:00
Source Domain: www.xtb.com
Over the past few years, the artificial intelligence revolution has begun to be told through a very simple investment narrative. At the center of this story stands a single protagonist: the GPU. Graphics processors have become the symbol of a new technological era, and their availability has directly determined which companies are able to train the most advanced language models, and which are left behind in the race for the future of AI.
As a result, the market quickly learned to think about artificial intelligence through a single metric: computational power. More GPUs meant larger models, larger models meant better products, and better products meant competitive advantage.
Over time, however, this narrative began to become more complex. It turned out that raw computational power is not enough if the system is unable to deliver data at the required speed. The bottleneck was no longer only GPUs, but increasingly memory as well—both the memory closest to the processor in the form of HBM, as well as traditional server DRAM and the entire data storage and transfer infrastructure.
This was the first moment when investors began to realize that the AI revolution is not a story of a single component, but of an entire technological chain—from silicon, through memory, to networking and cooling systems.
And now, just when the map of this revolution seemed relatively complete, another shift is emerging—far less obvious, but potentially just as important as the previous ones.
An increasingly important role is being played by a layer that for years was treated as “obvious infrastructure”: the CPU. In a world where AI is no longer a single query to a model, but instead resembles a complex system of autonomous agents performing multi-step tasks, not only the scale of computation is changing, but above all its nature.
At this point, a question arises that not long ago seemed secondary. Could the CPU, previously acting as a coordinator and…
