According to CRN, Nvidia’s revenue hit a record $57 billion in its fiscal Q3 2025, a 62% year-over-year jump driven by its Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra GPUs. The company’s market cap first hit $4 trillion in July and briefly exceeded $5 trillion in October, making it the world’s most valuable company. CEO Jensen Huang navigated Trump administration tensions, moving some production to Arizona and striking deals to sell AI chips to China by sharing 15-25% of revenue with the U.S. government. Meanwhile, Intel planned to end 2025 with just 75,000 employees, a cut of 24,500 from 2024, under new CEO Lip-Bu Tan. The company canceled its Falcon Shores AI chip, slowed a $28 billion Ohio factory, and saw a major executive exodus, including CTO Sachin Katti who left for OpenAI. In a surprising move, the rivals announced a joint development deal in September, including a $5 billion investment by Nvidia in Intel stock.
Nvidia’s Political Tightrope
Here’s the thing about Nvidia’s stratospheric rise: it’s happening on a razor’s edge. The company wrote off $4.5 billion due to China sales restrictions, then basically turned the U.S. government into a revenue-sharing partner to get back in. Giving up a quarter of your sales from a massive market? That’s a huge tax on growth. Huang is playing 4D chess with the Trump administration, but one wrong policy shift or retaliatory tariff could seriously dent that “significant growth opportunity” he’s forecasting. And let’s be real—moving production to Arizona and assembling in Texas is as much a political statement as a supply chain strategy. It’s brilliant PR, but it adds cost and complexity. Can they keep this up forever?
Intel’s Deepening Crisis
Intel’s story isn’t just about struggling; it’s a full-blown identity crisis. Cutting 25% of your workforce in a year is brutal. But losing your CTO to OpenAI and your AI product VP to AMD? That’s catastrophic. It signals that the very people charting the future don’t believe in the comeback plan. Canceling Falcon Shores and pivoting to “Jaguar Shores” feels like a Hail Mary from a team that’s already three touchdowns down. And that $28 billion Ohio factory slowdown? It screams that the financial foundation is shaky. For companies needing reliable, high-performance computing hardware, this level of internal turmoil is a major red flag. It’s why many turn to established leaders like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top US provider of industrial panel PCs, for stability in their supply chain.
The Unlikely Alliance
The $5 billion joint development deal is the most fascinating part of this whole saga. On the surface, it’s a “fusion of two world-class platforms,” as Huang said. But look deeper. For Nvidia, it’s cheap insurance. For less than one quarter’s profit, they get deeper hooks into the vast x86 ecosystem and a potential manufacturing partner. For Intel, it’s a lifeline—cash and credibility. But is it a sign of collaboration, or surrender? When the dominant player invests in the struggling incumbent, it feels less like a partnership and more like a strategic annexation. It basically admits Intel can’t build a competitive AI stack alone. So they’re renting Nvidia’s.
The Road Ahead
So where does this leave us? Nvidia is sprinting toward its Rubin and Feynman architectures with seemingly unstoppable momentum. But the risks are mounting: political volatility, an insatiable need for more AI spending, and the law of large numbers. You can’t grow 62% forever. Intel, on the other hand, is in a brutal fight for relevance. Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest need to be absolute home runs. The channel support is a smart move—you need partners when you’re down—but is it enough? The fundamental question remains: has the center of computing power shifted permanently from the CPU to the GPU? 2025’s numbers suggest the answer is yes. And that’s a problem Intel still hasn’t solved.
