Meta Muse and OpenAI Dots Revive CPU Demand, Boosting AMD and Intel

The CPU was once the main workhorse of computer servers before Nvidia's GPUs took center stage with ChatGPT and the generative AI boom. Now CPUs are back, lifting AMD and Intel, whose chips are specialized for powering long-running agents that can work for hours on their own.

OpenAI released its AI agent Dots last week, following Meta's early-September launch of Muse. Muse caught on quickly and topped the Apple App Store in less than two weeks. AMD and Intel were already big stock-market winners this year on surging CPU demand, but they have gained more in the past month, rising 32% and 21%, respectively, and beating all of tech's megacaps. AMD's growing strength in CPUs and GPUs has pushed the company into the trillion-dollar market-cap club.

Ryan Shrout, president of Signal65, which consults on AI hardware and costs, said that as more agents are created and used for more tasks, workloads will start to shift away from GPUs and onto CPUs.

Users learned about the power behind the new agents by asking them. Muse tells users it runs on an AMD-powered computer, while Dots says it runs on a virtual computer powered by AMD's EPYC-branded CPU. A Meta spokesperson told CNBC that the company designed its system to use whatever kind of CPU is available. “We take a diverse approach to our hardware and are largely CPU-agnostic by design, which gives us the most flexibility in acquiring capacity,” the spokesperson said. OpenAI similarly uses multiple CPU providers, meaning AMD is not the only option.

Most servers at hyperscalers Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft use CPUs made by Intel or AMD. But nearly every major cloud provider is also developing custom chips, typically based on Arm technology. Arm announced its own CPU for agents in March, with Meta as the debut customer, and its stock price has more than doubled since.

Earlier this year, Nvidia released Vera, a fully redesigned central processor, along with an entire rack filled only with CPUs. Nvidia says it built the new Vera CPUs specifically for agents and expects CPUs to be a $200 billion market by 2030. Analysts say, however, that this is one part of the chip industry where Nvidia is not currently the favorite. “It's just a new product and they're going to be competing against a lot of different players,” Jordan Klein, an analyst at Mizuho Securities, said in an interview, adding that he believes AMD currently has the best product.

CPUs are driving a healthy portion of AMD's growth. Revenue in the company's data center business more than doubled to $6.7 billion in the quarter ended June, accounting for almost 60% of total sales. Dan McNamara, AMD's senior vice president and general manager of compute and enterprise AI, said the conversation has changed quite a bit over the last eight to 10 months in terms of agentic usage. He added that CPU sales are going to really ramp.

Muse, Dots and even coding software like OpenAI's Codex use AI models to plan tasks that can run autonomously. The agents need their own computer that can run for hours or even days in the background, explained Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman. GPUs are still needed for inference, or processing an AI model, but an agent also needs a CPU. “CPUs are actually performing the workflows while GPUs are doing the thinking,” Newman said.

Meta and OpenAI use virtual machines, which partition a server into several lighter virtual computers so one server can support scores of users. Some AMD EPYC processors have up to 192 CPU cores. According to benchmarks and the agents themselves, Muse's virtual computer uses two cores and Dots uses nine.

CPUs are less expensive than GPUs. Benchmarks and queries show Dots using an AMD EPYC 9V74 CPU, which is available from resellers for under $3,000. The EPYC 9D25 reportedly used by Meta for Muse costs even less on the secondary market. Nvidia GPUs can cost more than 10 times that for a single chip, and they are usually sold in clusters of hundreds or thousands of chips.

Investors are watching how Meta plans to serve Muse users, after downloads surpassed 5 million since last month's launch, according to Sensor Tower. Morgan Stanley estimates Muse's serving costs at $3 to $130 per month, with an average of $37 per user, depending on inference usage. The firm says Meta's agent could account for 20% of AMD's 2026 chip sales.

There is a lot of money to be made in CPUs, and forecasts for the segment's growth are accelerating. Futurum estimates $118 billion in total CPU sales in 2027, almost double the firm's previous forecast in May.