Nvidia chips for laptop computers are set to hit the market this year in products from Dell, Lenovo and others, a return to the consumer PC market for the leader in artificial-intelligence chips.
The world’s most valuable company by market capitalization, Nvidia isn’t expecting big profit soon from getting its chips into everyday PCs, but analysts said it wanted to keep a connection with consumers in an era when every device will be AI-enabled.
“This isn’t just about supplying certain chips or making better parts. Instead, this is about Nvidia becoming more integrated into the next-generation PC ecosystem,” said Jason Tsai, deputy director of Taiwan-based research firm Digitimes.
Nvidia and its partners hope to make PCs lighter and thinner while keeping long battery life. Analysts said that would allow hardware running Microsoft’s Windows operating system to compete more directly with Apple’s latest MacBook models.
For the PC chip, Nvidia has two collaborations: one with Intel, which was announced last year, and a second with Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek, which was informally disclosed by Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang during a trip to Taiwan in January.
Nvidia’s new PC processors are designed to be what’s known as a system-on-a-chip. They integrate a central processor with the powerful graphics processing units for which the company is famous. GPUs are the chips that power AI models.
The system-on-a-chip is standard in smartphones such as the iPhone but not yet widespread in PCs. The Nvidia chip aims to provide PCs with the kind of efficiency and battery life typically associated with mobile devices, without sacrificing performance. Huang described it as “low power but very powerful.”
Microsoft and Nvidia haven’t said when PCs with Nvidia chips would be available or which brands would sell them.
People familiar with Nvidia’s supply chain said PC makers including Dell Technologies and Lenovo were working with the chip maker on models using the Nvidia-MediaTek system-on-a-chip, which is built on architecture from U.K. chip designer Arm. The first PCs with the chip could come in the first half of this year, they said.
Meanwhile, Nvidia is working with Intel, which controls about 70% of the market for chips running Windows PCs. The chips in the collaboration would integrate Intel’s central processing units, or CPUs, with Nvidia graphics and AI technology.
Fewer consumers are paying attention to PCs these days in a tech world dominated by talk of AI and smartphones, but laptops are still a big business. Nvidia’s Huang has observed that roughly 150 million laptops are sold each year, explaining why the area is worth his attention.
“There’s an entire segment of the market where the CPU and GPU are integrated,” he said last September. “That segment has been largely unaddressed by Nvidia today.”
Nvidia isn’t new to the system-on-a-chip business. Its processors have powered devices such as Nintendo’s Switch videogame console and earlier versions of Microsoft’s Surface tablets.
More recently, Nvidia focused on GPUs for videogames and AI. In recent years, Nvidia’s growth has been driven overwhelmingly by sales of GPUs for training and using AI models.
One target of the Nvidia PC chip will be videogamers, who are willing to pay a premium for hardware and are familiar with Nvidia as a leader in graphics chips.
For the Nvidia-MediaTek collaboration, the challenge will be making the PCs compatible with high-end games and other applications originally designed for the Intel standard.
The Arm architecture used by the Nvidia-MediaTek team has proved troublesome for gamers. In 2024, Microsoft rolled out new AI PCs with chips from Qualcomm using designs from Arm. Many gamers complained they couldn’t play their favorite games on those PCs.
“If this new all-in-one chip can push a standard laptop past today’s top-tier gaming rigs, gamers will be rushing to buy it,” said Larry Xie, a 41-year-old veteran gamer.
Tsai of Digitimes said Nvidia would need to keep the price of PCs built around its chip to the $1,000-$1,500 range. Otherwise, he said, “it may remain a niche luxury product.”
Write to Yang Jie at jie.yang@wsj.com