Report: Nvidia Poised to Re-Enter PC Market with Arm Chips … or x86 Chips … Or Something

It’s one of the worst-kept secrets in the industry, but AI chip giant Nvidia is poised to reenter the PC market with new system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs that will combine MediaTek Arm-based processors with its powerful graphics chips. It’s also poised to reenter the market with new x86 chips powered by Intel processors. So that’s a confusing, and a new report in The Wall Street Journal doesn’t help, though it sheds a bit of light on these plans and when we can expect to see the first PCs running on what might be two completely different chipsets.

According to the publication, “Dell, Lenovo, and others” will begin selling Windows 11 on Arm-based PCs running the new Nvidia/MediaTek chips “in the first half of this year” in a return to the consumer PC market for Nvidia. As you may (or may not) recall, Microsoft selected Nvidia as its Arm-based chip supplier for Windows RT, the Arm-based version of Windows 8, and Surface RT, its first consumer tablet-based PCs in 2012. Those efforts failed dramatically, but the blame was placed on Microsoft and the early state of Arm chips for PCs at the time, and not on Nvidia.

The WSJ says that Nvidia and MediaTek “hope to make PCs lighter and thinner while keeping long battery life,” but it fails to note that Qualcomm already achieved these goals with its Arm-based Snapdragon X series processors, which have also proven to be dramatically more reliable than traditional x86-based PCs running Intel and AMD silicon. But this feat will “allow hardware running Windows to compete more directly with Apple’s latest MacBook models,” the publication claims.

Nvidia isn’t just collaborating with MediaTek on its chips, the WSJ reports; it’s also working with Intel, of all companies, the failing one-time leader in this market. That said, it’s unclear what role Intel will play here. If it is manufacturing the chips, then this effort is doomed to failure, as Qualcomm uses the technically superior TSMC fabrication capabilities.

But the WSJ might be confusing matters here, too. It says that in addition to creating Arm-based chips with MediaTek, Nvidia is somehow integrating Intel’s CPUs with “Nvidia graphics and AI technology.” That can’t be the same family of chips, so it’s more likely that Intel will soon x64 CPUs with integrated Nvidia graphics to better compete with AMD, which integrates its own powerful graphics into its x64 chips. But if the WSJ is correct, Nvidia will somehow be involved in making a single SoC that combines Intel CPUs, Nvidia GPUs (graphics), and MediaTek/Arm … something. NPU? The publication doesn’t say.

Nvidia did announce that it would invest $5 billion in Intel back in September, and part of that deal involves integrating Nvidia RTX graphics with Intel CPUs. But that’s an x86 design, not Arm, and Nvidia has been working with MediaTek on Arm-based designs for PCs for years as well. I feel like these must be separate chipsets.

I guess we’ll know soon enough. We’re about one-third of the way through the first half of 2026 already and some key industry milestones, most notably MWC, are quickly approaching.