Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm. Which do you want powering your PC? If you don’t prefer any of them, you might have another option soon — and the name will be quite familiar. According to industry rumors, Nvidia is hoping to hop on the Arm-powered PC train for the larger consumer mass market later this year.
It’s been a while since Nvidia’s Arm offerings have made headlines for consumers. At the moment, the company is still best known for its Tegra processors, with which it attempted to break into the mobile market over a decade ago, and which still power the Nintendo Switch and the Nvidia Shield set-top box. (Rumors have also pointed to a Nvidia chip for the highly anticipated Switch successor.)
But with Qualcomm charging into Arm-powered Windows laptops, and recently mini PCs, and with Nvidia sitting on a massive hoard of industrial wealth thanks to the AI boom, it looks like the latter is hoping for some serious expansion beyond its bread-and-butter GPU business.
So sayeth a leaker on Twitter/X, spotted by Tom’s Hardware. According to the short (machine translated) report, Nvidia will partner with extensive Arm producer MediaTek to create a new series of processors. The first batch will be named the N1 for the fourth quarter of 2025, followed by the N1X in 2026, though both of those names could be placeholders. Both will, reportedly, be made with Windows on Arm in mind, the kind of thing you’d find in laptops and mini PCs.
The report says MediaTek is expecting to ship three million of these new Nvidia Arm processors in 2025 and 13 million in 2026. That’s extremely optimistic… but considering Nvidia’s market dominance over the last few years, I wouldn’t bet against them.
The leaker “HaYaO” issued this report on January 2nd, a few days before the start of CES 2025, where Nvidia debuted its Project Digits Arm-powered mini PC (pictured above). Nvidia calls the platform powering the hardware the GB10 Superchip, an all-in-one design with a Blackwell AI-focused GPU (the same architecture in the RTX 50-series) designed for high-end AI applications. This is most definitely not a consumer product, as consumers aren’t really in the market for a $3,000 mini PC. There’s no indication that it’s even intended to run Windows out of the box.
But the fact that Nvidia plans to bring Project Digits to market indicates that the company is indeed investing heavily in Arm-based processor tech, if not necessarily standard PC design. And though Microsoft and Qualcomm’s initial push for Arm PCs with Copilot+ branding has been a bit of a dud, that doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way. Nvidia’s branding power alone could push these products into higher markets, even if it isn’t aiming for gamers.
We’ve known for a while that other Arm chip vendors like MediaTek are eager to enter the PC market now that Windows on Arm is much more available, and Qualcomm’s exclusivity deal reportedly expired sometime in 2024. (MediaTek already sells some laptop-focused designs for Chromebooks.) At the moment, just about any company would jump at the chance to partner with Nvidia, especially on the lucrative chance to get sell huge volumes of PCs to consumers and businesses.
If you’ve been hoping for something to break up the duopoly of PC processors, 2025 might just be one for the books. We’ll be keeping a close eye out for any more indicative news coming down the pipe.
