With Nvidia graphics cards now unaffordable for all but the most desperate gamers, the king of CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is still trying to make its first laptops work in 2026. Unfortunately, we may not see Nvidia PCs until many months down the line. That could pose a problem for a company that seems to care so much about AI, and only AI.
We have witnessed a number of leaks all supporting the ownership of Nvidia’s first CPU, titled N1 and N1X. This past weekend, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang finally confirmed that he is making these chips during an interview with Taiwanese store UDN (read with machine translation). The black-jacketed head of the now world’s richest company said Nvidia was working with maker MediaTek on a brand new SoC (system on a chip). The N1 will be built for production machines, but the N1X may have the graphical juice for gaming on a portable device.
Nvidia’s N1 may miss most of the year
Previous leaks suggested that the N1X could match the current RTX 5050 GPU in lower watts. What is less promising is how long it may take to get there. The famous Moore’s Law deceased published several videos this week on his YouTube channel in which he said that Nvidia may delay the launch of its new chips until later, even in the summer of this year.
Some reliable sources like Digitimes have suggested that we could see more laptops in the spring this year, which are planned for the summer. The spring release looks very unlikely as the Mobile World Conference 2026 is coming and there is no sign of the N1 chip in sight. Summer will be late considering the competition. While AMD has new Ryzen AI Max chips built to play this year, Intel is the one company leading the pack in terms of overall performance and efficiency in its Panther Lake laptops. The gaming performance and battery life we’ve seen on these machines is much better than what we’ve seen on other low-powered laptops.
These Nvidia APUs (accelerated processing units with CPU and GPU capabilities) may still appear in the Lenovo Legion and Yoga products posted by well-known dataminer Huang514613 on X. There is a suggestion that we will get another Dell Premium 16 model with all Nvidia inside. Previous leaks have supported the idea that Alienware is also building the N1X laptop. (At CES 2026, the gaming brand owned by Dell showed off a lightweight gaming laptop that it declined to describe or even allow the media to photograph.)
There is a lot of evidence that these machines exist, but the fact that we haven’t seen their hide or hair yet is concerning. The anonymous sources of Moore’s Law Is Dead continue to say that Nvidia is facing a mountain of bugs and compatibility problems with Windows 11. Delay after delay will only increase the price problems when the cost of RAM has increased significantly.
We don’t know how N1 stacks up
The N1 chip will be an ARM-based processor. That’s a RISC-based microarchitecture that has long promised to be battery-friendly to match Intel and AMD’s near-monopoly in x86 computer architecture. Another major ARM-based chipmaker, Qualcomm, has introduced its latest Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Plus platforms for this year’s lineup of light laptops. This also promises strong graphics performance, but Nvidia’s graphics-accelerated technology in its CUDA environment promises to somehow outperform the competition. The problem is, we won’t know until Nvidia shows us something—anything—with these portable chips.
Nvidia—which has made a huge profit on the back of its AI training chips—hasn’t done enough to keep GPU prices anywhere near reasonable. There’s a large group of PC and gaming communities that feel left out by Nvidia as it breathes more air into the AI bubble. If, and when, that bubble bursts, Nvidia has to make sure there’s still an audience to help it pick up the pieces.
