Not content with dominating what is currently the hottest processor market in the world — chipsets for artificial intelligence — and leading among GPU suppliers, Nvidia is branching into CPUs. The 30-year-old company, whose market cap passed the $1 trillion mark in May, is said to be “quietly” developing chips to run Microsoft’s Windows OS, tapping into a global market that hovers at about 300 million PC sales per year, 70 percent of which use Windows, according to Statista. Nvidia is reportedly pursuing its plan via a licensing deal with Arm, whose tech powers 200 billion mobile processors shipped each year.

Nvidia tried to purchase Arm in 2020, signaling an intent to plow into the mobile and PC markets. The FTC kiboshed that deal last year, and owner SoftBank instead took Arm public on the Nasdaq market last month, when it achieved a $65 billion valuation on day one.

Nvidia’s “new pursuit is part of Microsoft’s effort to help chip companies build Arm-based processors for Windows PCs,” writes Reuters, which notes that “Microsoft’s plans take aim at Apple, which has nearly doubled its market share in the three years since releasing its own Arm-based chips in-house for its Mac computers, according to preliminary third-quarter data from research firm IDC.”

Intel, currently the leading supplier of chips for Windows PCs using an x86 architecture, in March signaled its intent to enter the Arm race. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has also disclosed it is “preparing Arm-based PC chips for 2025 debut,” writes Bloomberg.

“Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm’s efforts could shake up a PC industry that Intel long dominated but which is under increasing pressure from Apple,” suggests Reuters, adding that “Apple’s custom chips have given Mac computers better battery life and speedy performance that rivals chips that use more energy,” prompting executives at Microsoft to take notice, resulting in a “desire to attain similar performance.”

Nvidia is “no stranger to the CPU market,” having in 2021 introduced the Arm-based Grace data center CPU, explains SiliconANGLE, noting that “Nvidia doesn’t sell [Grace] on its own, but rather as part of a compute module,” the DGX GH200 Large Memory Superchip” which is “designed to speed up artificial intelligence applications deployed in data centers.”

Launching a PC processor takes Nvidia into a huge and completely different market.