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For the past few years, the AI hardware story had one main character: the GPU. Meta just handed a speaking role to the humble server CPU.
The company launched Muse, its personal AI agent, on September 8, 2026. It runs in CPU-only environments built on AMD EPYC processors. Within weeks, semiconductor investors had rewritten the script, and AMD’s market capitalization briefly crossed $1 trillion for the first time.
What Muse actually does, and what it runs on
Muse is designed to handle multi-step tasks on its own. Think booking travel, sending emails and managing projects through apps a user connects to it.
Under the hood, Meta built the system on AMD EPYC Turin processors, specifically the EPYC 9D25 models. Those chips feature up to 128 cores. An earnings report dated September 24-25, 2026, indicates Muse runs on the EPYC 9D25.
Each Muse user gets an Ubuntu sandbox with 2 virtual CPUs and 8 GB of memory.
Users showed up, and so did investors
Muse topped the US app store rankings shortly after launch. It also passed 500,000 daily active users in that early window.
AMD rallied hard enough to push its market cap above $1 trillion in mid-September 2026. Intel’s stock rose approximately 12% over the same period. Arm’s shares climbed about 17%.
The Motley Fool framed the theme as a group of AI semiconductor stocks positioned to benefit from the rise of AI agents.
The ratio that could reshape data center budgets
Estimates of CPU-to-GPU resource ratios for agentic workloads now range from 4:1 to 40:1 in specific scenarios.
Market forecasts suggest the server CPU market may surpass $120 billion by 2030 as businesses adjust to the compute demands of agentic AI.
OpenAI’s competing personal agent, Dots, is reportedly running on AMD EPYC hardware as well.
What this means for chipmakers and the AI race
For AMD, Muse is the clearest public validation yet of its server processor strategy in the agent era. Being the named hardware behind both Meta’s and, reportedly, OpenAI’s personal agents gives it a strong narrative heading into the next round of data center spending decisions. The $1 trillion milestone, even if brief, shows how much of that story investors are willing to pay for upfront.
For Intel and Arm, the gains look more like a sector-wide bet than a direct win. Their shares rose on the premise that rising CPU demand lifts all server processor makers.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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