While the move marks another win by Intel against AMD, Nvidia plans to make a bigger push into the CPU market this year with its custom, Arm-compatible Vera CPU, which will go into the company’s flagship Vera Rubin NVL72 platform as well as a stand-alone CPU offering.
Nvidia plans to use Intel’s Xeon 6 chips as the host CPU for the AI infrastructure giant’s upcoming DGX Rubin NVL8 systems as it makes a bigger push into the CPU market.
The DGX Rubin NVL8 systems were among the announcements Nvidia was expected to make during Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote Monday at its GTC 2026 event in San Jose, Calif.
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The DGX Rubin NVL8 systems will feature eight Rubin GPUs connected using Nvidia’s high-speed NVLink interconnect as part of the broader Vera Rubin platform the company plans to debut later this year. Other specs were not immediately available.
Announced by Intel at the start of Huang’s keynote, the plan to use Xeon 6 processors for Nvidia’s DGX Rubin NVL8 marks another win by the chipmaker against AMD, with all but one generation of the x86-based platform using its server chips as the host CPU. AMD only won the socket once with Nvidia’s DGX A100 system in 2020.
The announcement was made after Nvidia and Intel last September revealed an expanded partnership that will see the two companies develop “multiple generations” of products together for the PC and data center markets.
An Intel spokesperson told CRN that the DGX Rubin NVL8 engagement is separate from the company’s strategic partnership with Nvidia.
In a statement, Intel executive Jeff McVeigh said that Nvidia’s host CPU selection reflects the reality that the processor is “mission-critical” for agentic AI and reasoning systems.
“It governs orchestration, memory access, model security, and throughput across GPU accelerated systems,” said McVeigh, who is corporate vice president and general manager of data center strategic programs.
The company said that Nvidia chose its Xeon 6 processors “due to their capability to support fast memory speeds, balanced performance across a range of workloads, lower long-term total cost of ownership and their mature, enterprise-proven software ecosystem.”
The integration of Xeon 6 chips into the DGX Rubin NVL8 systems is “building on the architectural foundation established” with the custom Xeon 6776P processor it designed for Nvidia’s Blackwell-based platforms, including the DGX B300 systems,” according to Intel.
Meanwhile, Nvidia plans to make a bigger push into the CPU market this year with its custom, Arm-compatible Vera CPU, which will go into the company’s flagship Vera Rubin NVL72 platform as well as a stand-alone CPU offering.
According to research firm IDC, revenue generated from non-x86 servers, which mainly consists of Arm-based designs, increased 146.4 percent year over year to $55.5 billion in the fourth quarter of last year, representing 44.2 percent of total server revenue. Sales from x86-based servers, on the other hand, grew 16.9 percent to $69.8 billion for the same period.
