What makes NVIDIA Vera different from every other server CPU?

Agents spend half their time on the CPU

AI agents do more than generate answers. They search for information and query databases. They also write and test code and take action. Each of those steps relies on a CPU. Agents move between GPU reasoning and CPU execution throughout a task. As businesses put more agents to work, AI factories need CPUs that can execute those steps quickly and support many agents at once. All within the limits of available power.

Power limits force a choice between speed and density

Infrastructure providers need to support more agents without making each one wait longer to get work done. AI factories are power limited. Operators need to choose infrastructure that maximizes the work done for every watt. Until now that meant mixing fast x86 parts with dense x86 parts to balance speed and capacity. Vera delivers both fast agent performance and high capacity per watt within a single CPU. That gives providers one CPU for a range of agent workloads.

What the 100-megawatt test shows

In a 100-megawatt data center comparison NVIDIA found that a single Vera CPU performs better than the fastest x86 CPU and the most energy-efficient x86 CPU. Vera delivers industry-leading agent speed while enabling 1.6x more agents per watt versus the fastest x86 CPU. Vera delivers 2x faster agent speed with leading energy efficiency compared with the most energy-efficient x86 CPU. The announcement does not name the specific x86 models used in the comparison.

Six companies already testing in production

Early adopters see the same exceptional performance in production-style tests. Perplexity ran agentic coding tasks 1.5x faster with Vera than on traditional CPUs and plans to deploy Vera in an upcoming production system. DeepInfra delivered up to 2.2x speed of the best x86 processor on agentic orchestration for its production agent workload, achieving the fastest of the four architectures tested. ClickHouse ran its standard binary with no Vera-specific tuning, scaled near-linearly across 176 cores, and topped the ClickBench hardware leaderboard. DuckLabs achieved about 1.5x the median TPC-H SF1000 performance of an Intel Xeon 6 baseline. Daytona brought 1,000 agent sandboxes online in 10.8 seconds and achieved 12.7 completed jobs per second at 2,000 concurrent sandboxes using Vera versus 88.4 seconds with x86. Modal achieved up to 2x sandbox throughput per core versus comparable x86 hardware with gains that grow under heavy load.

When systems with Vera will ship

The blog post links to a page to learn more about the NVIDIA Vera CPU and to Jensen Huang's GTC Berlin Keynote scheduled for Wednesday Oct. 21 11 a.m.-1 p.m. CEST. It does not state a general availability date for systems containing Vera. How many Vera CPUs are already in customer hands is not disclosed.