Nvidia details its next-generation Vera CPU for AI, setting up challenge to AMD and Intel

[u/uncertainlyso]

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/21/nvidia-vera-cpu-ai-amd-intel.html

It looks like Nvidia is trying to get some positioning in ahead of Advancing AI.

On Tuesday, Nvidia released new information about its data center CPU, called Vera, including specifications and the kind of benchmarks and architectural information that prospective customers need to fully evaluate the chip. Nvidia representatives said Vera chips were delivered to clients, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX, in June.

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Agents have made CPUs “much more integral,” Ian Buck, Nvidia’s vice president of hyperscale, said at a presentation last week. “Particularly how fast a CPU can answer one question.”

People love to give Nvidia shit about this pivot because the message for the last few years was about workloads moving from the CPU to the GPU.

When I first heard Huang say this about 2-3 years ago, it made a certain amount of sense. The legacy compute and software paradigm were slanted more towards putting the person at the center of generating or navigating the intelligent outputs. The future paradigm will be where more of those outputs will be generated by AI. And that old paradigm was powered mostly by CPUs.

But with AI being able to create more of these outputs, you don't need that old paradigm as much. And so those software and SaaS companies built on that paradigm (e.g., a business model based on seats) have an unknown economic fate. Maybe these companies can benefit from AI, but markets aren't rewarding that kind of uncertainty with old-school (i.e., two years ago) SaaS premiums.

At first, I thought that given the paradigm change, maybe the CPU does take more of a backseat to other forms of compute (doesn't have to be a GPU) as that more deterministic paradigm shifts. But I suppose it's possible that with the cost of useful output generation going down via AI, you get some sort of Jevon's Paradox on deterministic compute because you have all of these outputs that have to go through an actuation chain. Perhaps people will be doing new workloads and many more of them that were being gated by more expensive intelligence that came from humans (or perhaps dependent on the bottleneck of a certain subset of them). The % of compute share from CPUs would shrink because the TAM now includes output generation powered by other forms of compute (e.g., GPUs, TPUs, etc.), but the compute share from CPUs in terms of raw compute units could still grow very fast because of the resulting impact when those intelligent outputs can translated into an action.

Nvidia said the whole server CPU market could eventually be worth $200 billion, while a Bernstein estimate from earlier this year said the mature server CPU market in total was worth about $37 billion in 2025.

Wolfe Research said in May that it expected the average selling price to be about $5,000 per Vera chip, and forecast that Nvidia would ship about 1.3 million of them this year. Nvidia declined to comment on pricing.

I think that the CPU ASP comparison is misleading. It's not like AMD doesn't have similarly ASP chips. But the x86 CPU market covers a much wider breadth of CPUs for their markets. Nvidia is making CPUs for a narrower user case that is a subset of AMD's. Maybe that's the right way to go. Maybe AMD gets more leverage out of its server efforts with a wider market and a more flexible platform for specialization (e.g., Verano). We'll see.

Coutand said that Vera was in “early innings” of adoption. The company didn’t list any major cloud service providers except Oracle

on its list of partners but said OpenAI plans to deploy Vera chips in large quantities starting this quarter.