NVIDIA Vera CPU Wins Modal Order to Challenge Intel and AMD
AI cloud startup Modal has placed an order for NVIDIA's new Vera CPU to power AI agents, marking a significant early win for NVIDIA in the server CPU market traditionally dominated by Intel and AMD. This deal signals a strategic shift as NVIDIA begins to capture market share in the roughly $200 billion server CPU industry. By outperforming existing alternatives in early tests for agentic workloads, NVIDIA is expanding its hardware ecosystem beyond GPUs. Early testing showed that NVIDIA's Vera CPU doubled the task-processing throughput for AI agents compared to current options, though Modal will maintain a hybrid hardware cluster deploying chips from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA in parallel.
## BACKGROUND
Central processing units (CPUs) serve as the foundational compute engines in servers, traditionally supplied by market veterans Intel and AMD. Agentic AI refers to advanced autonomous systems capable of executing long-cycle, multi-step tasks that require sequential reasoning, which places distinct performance demands on underlying processors.