AI agent execution runs on CPUs, benefiting Intel and AMD
Aravind Srinivas · Perplexity CEO: Micron Will Be More Valuable Than Meta & How Export Controls Helped Not Hurt China · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jun 15, 2026 · at 39:13
Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, explains how multi-step AI agent workflows create compute bottlenecks on CPUs rather than GPUs.
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“Agent loops, agent harnesses are all running on CPUs. The tokens are produced by the frontier models on GPUs, but whatever work, like, let's say like Claude generates a coding script that decides to download 500 files from different websites and then You know, munges a lot of data and transforms it into certain ways and generates a plot and then hosts it on a website that you can share with your people. All that compute is running on CPUs. Agents are using CPUs more than humans, right? And so suddenly there's a rise in enterprise CPUs and the beneficiaries of these are like Intel and AMD.”
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