TL;DR: Remember two months ago when Nvidia announced a CPU? It's already shipping. And, according to its earnings call yesterday, it’s set to make the company $20 billion this year—all because of one thing: agentic AI. Intel and AMD, which have dominated CPUs for decades, predictably aren't rolling out the welcome mat, and even Big Tech is building alternatives. Welcome to the CPU war—we’re just getting started.

What happened: Nvidia posted a record quarterly revenue of $81.6 billion (well above estimates). And on yesterday's call, CEO Jensen Huang declared he had found a “brand-new” market worth $200 billion that Nvidia had “never addressed before.”

“The world is rebuilding computing for agentic AI and robotic physical AI,” Huang said. This is what the Vera CPU chips it announced in March are built for. And, less than two months later, Nvidia VP Ian Buck personally delivered the first Vera systems to Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Oracle. (Watch him show up to Anthropic's office with a server and a screwdriver.)

The CPU bet: As we said in March, agentic AI is the reason CPUs are suddenly so important—agents don't just answer questions; they complete tasks: browsing the web, calling tools, running code. (We have a great explainer video on how all this works.) All of that is CPU work—not GPU, which is how Nvidia built its empire.

With demand for AI agents increasing (it seems they’re about to be in every device ever), Nvidia appears to be placing its bet on CPUs, with reports that it’s working on a laptop CPU that could be unveiled as soon as next month. This could be important for Nvidia moving forward, with Huang saying it has “largely conceded” China's AI chip market to Huawei (a market that once made up around 20% of its data center revenue).

Not so fast: The CPU incumbents are giving Nvidia the side-eye. Intel and AMD have dominated CPUs for decades—and both are already riding the AI demand wave hard. But Nvidia's entry threatens to redirect the fastest-growing slice of that market, and neither is treating it as a speed bump: Intel is tightening its quality standards to sharpen its edge, and AMD is going after Nvidia's AI hardware directly with its new chips. The competition runs even broader: Meta recently signed a deal for Amazon’s homegrown AI CPUs—going around the established chipmakers altogether.

Bottom line: With agentic AI and inference only becoming more important, Nvidia is betting $20 billion is just the beginning of the CPU wars. —SM

My back hurts less, and I didn't have to leave the house

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I've been in and out of physical therapy for (mostly) my lower back since 2019. One of the things a PT often does—besides, like, actually fixing you—is attach small electrode pads to whatever hurts and run gentle electrical pulses through the muscle. It sounds scarier than it is.

It's called TENS and EMS therapy, and it's one of the more effective tools for pain relief and muscle recovery that most people have never heard of. Scheduling a PT appointment every time your back flares up, though, is its own special kind of pain—which is why I was curious about the Chirp Halo, a wireless, FDA-cleared device that brings the same technology home (for $179.99).

How we tested it: Through six weeks of weekly sessions, all targeting my lower back. My PT history meant I already knew how to place the pads correctly, which made setup straightforward. I worked through all six preset modes: Pain Relief, Massage, Squeeze, Thump, Stretch, and Woah Nelly (yes, that's a real one). I kept intensity between 20 and 30 on the 0–50 scale.

The Good: At intensity 22, the stimulation felt identical to what I get at the PT office. Every mode has a clear use case depending on what you need. The day after each session, my back felt noticeably better—and that relief stuck around for a few days. It also comes with small round pads if you want to do different areas—like your legs or arms. If you already know your way around a TENS machine, this is a capable at-home option.

The Bad: Positioning the pads on your own lower back is a little annoying—a mirror helps, but you'll still need to make peace with some contortion. Above intensity 30, things tip from therapeutic into uncomfortably zappy. (The manual notes this is actually useful when the pad adhesive starts to wear down, so file that away.)

Verdict: Signal (if you're new to this kind of therapy, start low and go slow). —SM

Usually, it’s the experts who watch a harebrained plot unfold in a sci-fi film and sigh that none of the technobabble actually holds up. But in a genuine plot twist, a surprising number of neurosurgeons are willing to bet that preserved human brains could boot back up one day, according to a survey out of Australia’s Monash University. While the 334 doctors polled overall figured preservation had about a 25% shot at keeping “critical psychological information” in your gray matter intact, the ones who actually cut into brains for a living gave it a whopping 72% vote of confidence.

In this case, it might be the other doctors’ unfamiliarity with the subject matter that’s leading to their skepticism, according to the survey’s lead researcher. Newer cryonic preservation approaches don’t just deep-freeze brains—they chemically lock their structure in place so that your personality, including your fondness for corn as a pizza topping, survives. If the longevity tech bros turn out to be wrong on living forever, at least there’s still a doctor-approved shot at living again. Next thing you know, you’re thawing out in the year 3000 with a chain-smoking robot for a best friend. —WK

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