Meta Muse gives AMD a boost as AI momentum shifts to personal agents

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The personal AI agent boom is giving AMD and Intel new life after the companies spent years watching Nvidia and its GPUs dominate the artificial intelligence market.

The central processing unit (CPU) was once the primary workhorse of a computer server before Nvidia's graphics processing units took center stage with the launch of ChatGPT and the start of the generative AI era. Now CPUs are back, lifting the fortunes of market leaders AMD and Intel, whose chips specialize in powering long-running agents that can work for hours on their own.

Last week OpenAI released its AI agent Dots, following the lead of Meta, which debuted Muse in early September. Muse caught on so quickly that it topped the Apple App Store in less than two weeks. Well before that, AMD and Intel were already huge winners on the stock market this year due largely to surging demand for CPUs, but they've picked up steam in the past month, jumping 32% and 21%, respectively, beating all of tech's megacaps.

AMD's growing strength in both CPUs and GPUs has pushed the company into the trillion-dollar market cap club.

"As more agents are created and developed, and more people start to use them for more tasks, it's going to start to shift the workload away from GPUs and onto CPUs," said Ryan Shrout, president of Signal65, which consults on AI hardware and costs.

Users learned about the power behind the new agents by asking them. Muse tells users that it runs on an AMD-powered computer, while Dots said it runs on a virtual computer powered by AMD's EPYC-branded CPU.

A Meta spokesperson told CNBC that the company designed its system to use whatever kind of CPU is available.

"We take a diverse approach to our hardware and are largely CPU-agnostic by design, which gives us the most flexibility in acquiring capacity," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.

OpenAI similarly uses multiple CPU providers, meaning AMD isn't the only game in town.

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GPUs think, CPUs do

CPUs are less expensive than GPUs.