Everyone's been watching the GPU war. Nvidia versus the world.
But the real fight for AI agents is happening one chip over - in CPUs.
And Amazon just locked in a $6 billion customer.
Snowflake just signed a five-year, $6 billion contract with AWS. For context, Snowflake has sold roughly $7 billion worth of its services through AWS Marketplace since it was founded in 2012.
So one new contract nearly matches everything that came before it.
Snowflake says its customers doubled their AWS spending in 2025, hitting $2 billion for the year.
The driver is Cortex AI - Snowflake's tool that lets companies ask plain-English questions of their own data and pull back summaries, reports, and answers.
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Here's the part of the deal that matters: Snowflake didn't sign up for more GPUs.
It signed up for more access to Graviton, Amazon's homegrown ARM-based CPU chip.
GPUs do the heavy lifting when AI models are trained and reasoning. CPUs handle almost everything else - including the constant background work that AI agents need to run.
As AI moves from training to daily use to automation, CPU demand is climbing fast - and Amazon is winning that race by undercutting Nvidia on price and passing the savings straight to customers.
That's been enough to pull in massive deals. Last month, Meta agreed to buy millions of Graviton chips - just months after committing $10 billion to Google Cloud.
Microsoft launched its own AI chip, Maia, in January - joining Google, which has been building its own for years.
Nvidia isn't sitting still.
CEO Jensen Huang said last week that the company's new AI-specific CPU, Vera, opens up a "brand new" $200 billion market - and Nvidia has already sold $20 billion worth.
Translation: the chip giant sees the CPU fight coming and wants in.
The bigger story for investors is that AI spending isn't flowing to one company anymore.
The cloud giants are pulling in their share, and the chips they build in-house are starting to win business that used to be locked up by Nvidia.
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