Intel CEO says CPU demand is surging as AI agents advance, with many CEOs calling him directly for more supply

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said demand for central processing units is rising on the back of AI agents, with many corporate chiefs calling him directly to secure more supply.

According to Chinese media outlet Yicai, as cited by Yonhap News Agency, Tan said at the Computex IT trade show in Taipei, Taiwan on the previous day, "the importance of CPUs is growing." He added that the rise of AI agents requires new system architectures and that CPUs are playing a critical role in reinforcement learning and orchestration. "In the past four weeks, a very large number of CEOs have called me personally hoping to secure more CPU supply," he said.

AI agents are AI systems capable of carrying out specific tasks autonomously — such as product recommendations and reservations. They have gained wide traction in China and elsewhere, with platforms such as OpenClaw drawing significant attention.

Tan said AI agents rely on CPUs more heavily than expected as they conduct reinforcement learning and collaborate with multiple AI models. Corporate demand for CPUs has risen sharply, he said, and supply of some products is already showing signs of strain.

Amid the global AI boom, market attention had long centered on graphics processing units used to train large language models. But as AI applications shift from model training toward inference, execution and automated task management, companies are increasingly turning their focus to CPUs.

The shift is intensifying competition in the CPU market, long dominated by Intel and AMD. Nvidia is also seen as having made a serious entry into the CPU space targeting AI agent services.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Monday that Vera Rubin, the company's next-generation AI accelerator, is "in full production," and that Vera — the CPU component — has dramatically boosted AI agent performance.

Tan said future competition will play out not around the performance of individual chips but across entire AI ecosystems. He said he hopes Intel can reassert a central role in the AI era by combining chip design and manufacturing with system platform and software ecosystem capabilities.

"This year is a year of transformation for Intel. We cannot stay in the past," he added. "We are building a completely new Intel, and we are just getting started."