Nvidia and Intel: Old Enemies Building a New Chip While Musk Fears China

The technology industry is entering a phase where yesterday's sworn enemies are beginning to share the same bed, and market leaders openly acknowledge the threat posed by eastern competitors. Jensen Huang officially confirmed that Nvidia is collaborating with Intel to create a custom processor based on the X86 architecture. This event can be considered a tectonic shift.

For a long time, Nvidia relied on ARM architecture or proprietary developments, but it appears that for deep integration into data center ecosystems and specific corporate tasks, Intel's capabilities and the X86 architecture, proven over decades, are still necessary. This partnership looks like an attempt by Nvidia to cement its dominance in the server solutions market, leveraging Intel's manufacturing expertise, which Intel currently needs for survival. While chipmakers negotiate alliances, Elon Musk delivered a dose of sobering analysis in Tesla's quarterly earnings report.

According to him, there are no other serious players in the world of humanoid robots besides Tesla and Chinese companies. Musk emphasized that China's manufacturing base has reached incredible heights, and that's where he sees the main competitors for his Optimus. Interestingly, the role of "brain" in this ecosystem is assigned to Grok from xAI.

Musk calls it the "conductor" that will manage not only robots but also the entire fleet of autonomous vehicles. This is an important signal: Tesla is definitively transforming from a car manufacturer into a company where software and AI agents determine the value of hardware. Without advanced chips, as Musk noted, any robot is simply an expensive and useless pile of metal.

However, the real world makes adjustments to ambitious plans. Efirt, one of the notable players in the industrial robotics market, announced a price increase on its products of 5–12%. The reason sounds like a battlefield report: copper has become 38% more expensive, aluminum 25%, and memory chips have skyrocketed by an insane 300%.

This is a cold shower for those accustomed to discussing AI only in the context of cloud computing and algorithms. Physical embodiment of intelligence requires resources, and these resources are becoming scarce and expensive. Inflation in the high-tech hardware sector may become the main brake on robotization over the next two years.

Against this backdrop, ByteDance continues its expansion into consumer hardware. The Doubao smartphone project, whose first version was more of a trial balloon, is transitioning into a full-scale stage. The second iteration of the device, being developed jointly with ZTE, is expected in mid-2026.

ByteDance is betting that an AI assistant should be integrated at the core system level, rather than existing as a separate application. This is a direct attack on Apple and Google's territory. If the company can create a seamless experience of interacting with AI in the user's pocket, the rules of the game on the smartphone market will change forever.

Alibaba is not lagging behind, having decided to consolidate its efforts in autonomous transportation. The merger of its autonomous driving division with Zelos shows that the era of fragmented experiments has ended. Giants are striving to pool resources to bring commercial autonomous vehicles to the roads faster.

Meanwhile, Xpeng is patenting new mechanisms for robot manipulators, trying to reduce the risk of drive damage and make operation cheaper. The industry is clearly shifting focus from "just working" prototypes to economically efficient and reliable machines. Bottom line: Nvidia's willingness to work with Intel and Musk's acknowledgment of China's strength indicate that old patterns no longer work.

We are entering an era of hybrid technologies and fierce competition for physical resources. Will Western software defeat Chinese manufacturing in the robotics race?