Arm and Nvidia announced at the Supercomputing '25 conference that Arm had joined the NVLink Fusion ecosystem, marking a major advance for the technology, which is now supported by two major microarchitecture developers and four CPUs developers in total. For Nvidia, this means that Arm's customers will develop processors that can work with Nvidia's AI accelerators, whereas Arm will also be able to design CPUs that could compete against Nvidia's own or Intel processors in Nvidia-based systems.
"Arm is integrating NVLink IP so that their customers can build their CPU SoCs to connect Nvidia GPUs," said Dion Harris, the head of data center product marketing at Nvidia. " With NVLink Fusion, hyperscalers can significantly reduce design complexity, save development costs, and reach the market faster. The addition of Arm customers provides more options for specialized semi-custom infrastructure."
Arm is a large company with diverse businesses, including ISA and IP licensing, and the development of custom CPUs and system-on-chips (SoCs) for large customers. For each type of business, NVLink Fusion support gives certain benefits.
As an IP provider, Arm gets a major new competitive lever in the data-center market by supporting NVLink Fusion. By integrating NVLink IP directly into its architecture portfolio, Arm can offer its licensees a ready-made pathway to build CPUs that plug natively into Nvidia's AI accelerator ecosystem. In theory, this makes Arm-based designs far more attractive to hyperscalers and sovereign cloud builders who want custom CPUs and compatibility with market-leading Nvidia GPUs for AI and HPC. Previously, Nvidia's Grace CPUs were the only processors compatible with Nvidia GPUs for NVLink connectivity.
While Nvidia only mentions Arm as an IP provider, Arm also gains benefits as a developer of its own CPUs aimed at hyperscalers and sovereign organizations. Specifically, Arm gains the ability to compete directly inside Nvidia-based systems. With native NVLink Fusion integration, future Arm-designed server CPUs can compete head-to-head with both Nvidia's Grace and Vera, as well as Intel Xeon, in systems where Nvidia GPUs are the central compute element. With NVLink Fusion, Arm CPUs can become first-class participants in rack-scale NVLink solutions, assuming that Nvidia allows this to happen, which is not guaranteed.
Also, NVLink Fusion support strengthens Arm's position as an ISA licensor, as it makes the Arm architecture inherently more attractive to hyperscalers and chip designers who want custom CPUs tightly integrated with Nvidia GPUs. By ensuring that Arm-based CPU designs can work with Nvidia GPUs using the coherent NVLink fabric — rather than being limited to PCIe — Arm gains ecosystem gravity and 'future-proof' relevance that competing ISAs like x86 and RISC-V cannot match today. For sure, this poses risks to both AMD and Intel as the former is barely interested in supporting NVLink, while the latter is years away from building custom NVLink-supporting Xeon CPUs for Nvidia's rack-scale systems. Then again, we have to keep in mind chip development cycles and other factors here, as by the time Arm-based CPUs with NVLink are ready, Intel's custom Xeon CPUs will be ready as well.
Arm's support for NVLink Fusion benefits Nvidia by massively expanding the pool of CPUs that can serve natively in Nvidia-centric AI systems using NVLink, without Nvidia having to build all those CPUs itself. By enabling Arm licensees — such as Google, Meta, and Microsoft — to integrate NVLink directly into their SoCs, Nvidia ensures that future Arm-based processors will be either architected around Nvidia GPUs, or at least compatible with them. On the one hand, this could reduce the appeal of open alternatives like UALink; on the other hand reduce the appeal of AI accelerators from companies like AMD, Broadcom, and Tenstorrent in general.
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As an added bonus, it also strengthens Nvidia's position in sovereign AI projects that use Arm CPUs (at least in the next few years): governments and cloud providers that want custom Arm CPUs for control-plane or data-loading tasks can now adopt them without leaving Nvidia's GPUs.
All in all, Arm's addition to the NVLink ecosystem is a win for both Arm, Nvidia, and a bunch of their partners, but could pose great risks for AMD, Intel, and Broadcom.
Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
