CPUs are back in focus. TrendForce's weekly radar shows server CPU lead times have stretched to 25–30 weeks, up from 16–20 weeks in a balanced market — a sizable dislocation for chips that were the semiconductor industry's afterthought just a few years ago.

The driver, according to TrendForce, is agentic AI: personal AI agents like Meta's Muse need orchestration compute, and that workload lands on CPUs as cloud providers accelerate their in-house chip designs. "Meta's Muse has put server CPUs back in focus," the report notes.

It's an early signal that the agent era changes who benefits from AI compute spending. GPUs still dominate the training side, but if every consumer agent needs persistent cloud orchestration, CPU capacity becomes a bottleneck of its own — and it's already tightening.