Chipmakers Arm, Intel, and AMD saw shares climb 16%, 13%, and 10% respectively following expectations for higher CPU demand sparked by AI agents. Agent systems require more CPU cores for asynchronous tasks like browsing and spreadsheets and use more than 15 times as many tokens as human users. A 1 gigawatt data center now needs 120 million CPU cores to support AI agents, compared to 30 million for previous workloads.
