Nvidia Corporation introduced the Vera CPU, which achieved up to twice the task throughput of similar Intel systems during its initial independent artificial intelligence agent benchmark, according to results released by cloud computing startup Modal after the company obtained its first Vera server from Nvidia and evaluated it against Intel Granite Rapids, AMD Zen 5, and AWS Graviton processors.
Nvidia initially introduced Vera in March at GTC 2026 as a general-purpose data center central processing unit engineered for agentic artificial intelligence workloads, using a custom Olympus architecture featuring 88 Arm-based cores along with spatial multithreading that physically divides execution units and caches to allow threads to advance independently of shared resources, while also delivering up to 1.2 TB/s of LPDDR5X memory bandwidth, which equals about 13.6 GB/s per core under full load.
Erik Dunteman, an engineer at Modal, executed the evaluation using the Agentless Agent Bench benchmark encompassing 50 tasks like code compilation, file searches, Git operations, and device emulation inside prewarmed Docker containers lacking network calls, where Vera steadily sustained superior throughput as concurrent tasks grew, although Dunteman pointed out that "Vera often performed better than the other CPUs, but not always."
Modal linked the throughput improvements partly to the high memory bandwidth of Vera, explaining that rival systems reached throughput bottlenecks earlier because individual artificial intelligence agent workloads can surge to 10 times typical central processing unit utilization, while Nvidia reviewed telemetry originating from more than 163,000 agent sessions to discover that over 97% displayed unique execution patterns, prompting the firm to build Vera to preserve single-task speed during erratic concurrent operations.
Modal recently secured $750 million at a valuation of $15.75 billion, anticipates $1 billion in sales over the upcoming year, and has experienced revenue growth exceeding 15 times year over year, with CEO Erik Bernhardsson informing Reuters that the startup will keep using Intel and AMD processors together with Vera.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, CoreWeave, Lambda, and Nebius revealed intentions to install Vera-based infrastructure, and Nvidia identified Anthropic and OpenAI as artificial intelligence developers investigating the processor, establishing Vera as Nvidia's most direct competition yet against Intel and AMD within the data center central processing unit market.
