New Delhi, July 31 -- SANTA CLARA - For most of the past decade, AMD and Intel ran the server CPU market like a two-party system. Arm-based chips were an interesting experiment, strong in smartphones and tablets, and quietly growing inside cloud providers' custom silicon programs. That comfortable arrangement is now facing its first serious commercial disruption, and the name at the front of it is Nvidia.

Nvidia has shipped more than 2.5 million Grace server CPU units and is already transitioning customers to its next architecture, Vera, which the company says runs 50 percent faster than x86 processors, the instruction set AMD and Intel have shared since the 1980s. Nvidia is projecting $20 billion in Vera server CPU revenue in the curren...