Who invented the CPU?

J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, invented the EDVAC, perhaps the first computing machine with the "stored-program" architecture typical of modern CPUs.

That architecture is called the "von Neumann architecture" after John von Neumann, who write a widely distributed paper about the EDVAC.

Some people incorrectly believe that

Intel, as a company invented the first CPU.

While it is true that the people at Intel built the first microprocessor (a CPU on a single chip), the 4004, in 1971, which was a great achievement at the time,

there were a variety of other, previous CPUs built out of a few dozen integrated circuits, a few thousand individual transistors, or a few thousand vacuum tubes.

The first commercially available computer was the 1951 Ferranti Mark 1, designed by Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn at the University of Manchester.

IBM sold about 20,000 of the refrigerator-sized IBM 1401 CPUs first introduced in 1959.
john macain