Last week two specific giants in the tech industry reported quarterly earnings that could not have painted a more opposing view of the state of AI and compute. There are several more of interest coming up this week, including AMD, Qualcomm, and Amazon, but with Intel and Microsoft news now a couple of days behind us, I think it’s worth dissecting what those results tell us about the state of AI.

Just days ago, Nvidia showed the world how valuable the AI market is to silicon and solution providers by announcing a new set of hardware and services during its annual GPU Technology Conference in San Jose. While that news was focused on data center AI compute in the form of multi-million dollar servers powered by some of the largest processors and chips ever produced, the world of client AI, where AI runs on individual laptops and PCs, presents an equally appealing, and profitable, arena for technology giants to take advantage of.

In what seems like just one in a series of critically important moments for the most followed and scrutinized tech company in the world, Nvidia hosted developers, partners, and analysts this week in San Jose for its annual GTC event. This is Nvidia’s preeminent showcase of everything AI; at least it has become that as it shifted its focus from gaming and graphics, to compute and artificial intelligence.

In the world of AI, and the computing infrastructure that powers AI, there is only one king: Nvidia. The company has skyrocketed to one of the largest in the world on the back of it success leading the transition to an AI computing ecosystem. It has a dominant hold on the chips that power the data centers and servers that enable companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to deliver the AI services that gather the headlines.

In what is likely one of the biggest stories in tech for the week, Arm Holdings, a company that only recently returned to being a public company in September, saw a huge spike in its stock, nearly 60% at one point, after its quarterly earnings report. As recently as Halloween Arm was under $50, yet broke $120 on Thursday.

The heart of this new device is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, first announced at the company’s Snapdragon Summit back in late October. This SoC has 8 CPU cores (one Arm Cortex-X4, five Cortex-A720, two Cortex-A520) that the company claims offers 30% better performance over the previous gen, an updated Adreno GPU that is 25% faster, and maybe you’ve heard of this thing called AI? The integrated Hexagon NPU (neural processing unit) is more than 40% faster than last year’s model thanks to hardware and drastic software improvements from the engineering team.