Investing.com -- Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) shares rose 5% Friday following strong earnings from Intel that lifted the broader semiconductor sector.

Intel’s first-quarter results showed demand for central processors from AI service providers exceeded expectations, with the company selling chips it had previously written off. Intel shares surged 24% to $83, pushing its market value above $416 billion and surpassing its dot-com era peak from 2000.

The rally extended across the chip sector, with AMD gaining 14% and Arm rising more than 13%. The gains reflected growing market conviction that inference—the process by which AI systems answer user queries—could restore central processing units to a more prominent role after years of graphics chips dominating AI training workloads.

Nvidia’s $5 trillion market cap made it the largest mover in dollar terms Friday. Notably, Nvidia unveiled a new central processor last month, marking a rare expansion into territory traditionally dominated by Intel and AMD.

The company launched the Grace CPU in 2023, an ARM-based processor designed to work alongside its GPUs in Grace Hopper and Grace Blackwell Superchips to reduce data bottlenecks in AI workloads.

At GTC 2026, Nvidia introduced the Vera CPU featuring the custom Olympus core and Spatial Multithreading technology, which the company says delivers double the efficiency of traditional x86 CPUs for agentic AI tasks.