NVIDIA claims that the demand for Vera is so bonkers that it could become the world’s top GPU and CPU supplier this year.
Nvidia recently said its Vera CPUs were in full production, with the first CPU racks hand-delivered to OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic and Oracle.
For those who came in late, Vera is a key part of the Extreme Co-Design ecosystem powering Rubin, but it drags Nvidia into the standalone CPU market for the first time.
The Arm-based chip uses 88 custom Olympus cores and is built for agentic AI and inference workloads. Nvidia says Vera offers 50 per cent better performance, twice the performance per watt and four times the rack density of traditional x86 CPUs.
It handles orchestration, tool calling, reinforcement-learning workloads, data analytics, agent sandboxing, and long-context state management. The chip is aimed at AI labs, cloud providers and enterprises running agentic AI at scale.
Its core specs include 88 custom Olympus cores, 1.2TB/s memory bandwidth and 50 per cent faster per-core performance under full load. Nvidia claims Vera opens a new $200 billion total addressable market.
The company expects nearly $20 billion in CPU revenue this year, mostly driven by Vera. That would put Nvidia on course to become the world’s leading CPU supplier, surpassing AMD and Intel, both of which are seeing strong CPU demand from agentic AI workloads.
Nvidia said Vera was co-designed with Rubin GPUs and NVLink to deliver up to 1.5 times faster per-core performance. It claims Vera delivers twice the performance per watt and four times the density per rack compared with x86-based alternatives.
Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress said: “Vera CPU opens a brand new $200 billion town for NVIDIA, a market we have never addressed before, and every major hyperscale and system maker is partnering with us to get it deployed. We have visibility to nearly $20 billion in total CPU revenue this year, setting us up to become the world-leading CPU supplier.”
The more interesting bit is that the $20 billion number is not for every Vera CPU use case. It applies only to the standalone CPU. Vera will be used as the host CPU for Rubin racks, with two Vera chips connected to four GPUs. Nvidia has entry-level NVL4 racks that use Intel Xeon CPUs.
The company says it will ship millions of Rubin GPUs, which are now in full production, with first shipments planned for the third quarter of 2026. Then there is Vera with CX9 for storage and Vera with CX9 for security.
The standalone CPU is the piece counted in the $20 billion figure, which puts it ahead of AMD EPYC and Chipzilla Xeon CPU figures for this year.
There are some awkward constraints in Vera’s way. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said Vera Rubin will be supply-constrained throughout its life.
The other big choke point is memory, because Vera leans heavily on LPDDR5X, which is already being gobbled up by the AI supercycle. Nvidia is investing heavily to ease those constraints, but demand keeps swelling and both Vera and Vera Rubin need plenty of memory.
“The 20 billion is for a standalone CPU. And remember, we have Vera, which is used in three ways as a standalone CPU, and four ways. Let me just start with the one that you already know. The first way is Vera Rubin. And we’ll sell millions of Rubins, and every two of them is connected to a Vera. And of course, we price those too. And they’re properly priced. And so that’s number one use case.” Huang said.
The second use case is Vera standalone CPU. The third is Vera with CX9 and the storage software stack. And then Vera, with CX9, a software stack for security, compute isolation, and confidential computing. And so each one of those use cases is built on Vera. And my sense is that we’ll be supply-constrained throughout Vera Rubin’s entire life.
And Vera was designed to be an agentic CPU. The CPUs of the past were designed to have many cores so that it could be easily rentable. People rented cores. Well, agents don’t rent cores. They just want the work to be done fast. The economics of the past was dollars per core,” Huang said.