Why the Next Wave of AI Compute Will Return to CPU, Not GPU
AI News Flash: Nikkei Asia’s latest Tech Latest Podcast features Taipei tech correspondent Lauly Li in conversation with host Katey Creel. The core topic: why the AI wave is triggering a full CPU revival. For a long time, AI training and inference workloads have been almost entirely dominated by GPUs, but as model sizes continue to balloon, GPU supply bottlenecks and high power consumption are getting increasingly severe. Chipmakers are actively reassessing the role of CPU in AI infrastructure—especially on the inference side—where CPUs offer cost and flexibility advantages in latency-sensitive, small-batch scenarios. Some vendors are also experimenting with heterogeneous architectures pairing CPUs with AI accelerators to diversify their over-reliance on a single GPU.