Investment bank UBS reckons agentic AI will send CPU demand soaring, with Arm and AMD best placed to grab the spoils.
UBS analysts believe the growth of agentic AI software will drive strong demand for CPUs in the AI era. The bank said agentic AI increases processor workloads and favours chips with higher core counts and better power efficiency.
That view gives Arm the biggest potential upside, followed by AMD. Intel could benefit too, since a growing total addressable market tends to lift more than one silicon boat.
In fresh coverage of British chip design house Arm, UBS said CPU demand is surging. The bank said agentic AI computing will favour chips with higher core counts and a bias towards power efficiency.
UBS reckons the total server market could grow five times by calendar year 2030. It put the figure at $170bn, up from $30bn in calendar year 2025.
Within that market, UBS expects Arm to benefit the most. The bank said Arm could potentially grab as much as 40-45 per cent of the total share, which would make the x86 crowd choke on its roadmaps.
The bank’s report cited expert comments behind three main themes explaining the surge in CPU demand. The first is that agentic AI workloads rely more heavily on CPU cores.
That shift is expected to require a three- to fivefold increase in CPU core counts per user and per GPU. Servers with standalone CPUs will need more chips, which is the kind of problem chip sellers enjoy having.
UBS said that demand for agentic AI will push some workloads to local PCs. It pointed to Anthropic’s Claude Code as an example.
The need for higher core counts and power efficiency should tilt demand first towards Arm and then AMD. That sounds grim for anyone still selling yesterday’s watt-guzzling boxes as tomorrow’s AI answer.
Chipzilla could still serve this market through its Coral Rapids platform, according to UBS. The catch is that benefiting from a bigger market and winning the best bits of it are not quite the same trick.