Nvidia's new Vera CPU secures early adoption from CoreWeave, Meta, Oracle, and Alibaba, opening a new compute market beyond GPU acceleration.

As CPU demand continues to surge in AI infrastructure, NVIDIA's Vera CPU racks are experiencing unprecedented interest from major industry players. According to GFHK (GF Holdings Hong Kong), CoreWeave, Meta, Oracle, and Alibaba have already secured Vera CPU racks as early adopters, positioning themselves at the forefront of the next generation of AI compute. This is reported to be an initial list, with further orders expected as the CPU super cycle accelerates.

The adoption of Vera by Alibaba is particularly noteworthy, as China faces restrictions on accessing NVIDIA's latest AI chips, including Rubin. The inclusion of one of China's prime AI firms among the early adopters underscores the tightness in global CPU supply chains. The broader market context shows that CPUs are being consumed tenfold across Agentic AI workflows, with both Intel and AMD experiencing massive demand. Beyond NVIDIA, competitors are advancing their own solutions: Arm has launched its AGI CPU, expected to ship $2.0 US billion in revenue, and Qualcomm is developing its own data center CPU anticipated to ship in 2028.

NVIDIA's Vera CPU is engineered with custom Arm architecture codenamed Olympus, featuring 88 cores and 176 threads with NVIDIA Spatial Multi-Threading. The processor incorporates a 1.8 TB/s NVLink-C2C coherent memory interconnect, 1.5 TB of system memory (3x Grace), and 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth with SOCAMM LPDDR5X, along with rack-scale confidential compute capabilities. According to NVIDIA, the Vera CPU delivers "extremely high single-threaded core performance, incredibly high data output, and extreme levels of energy efficiency," while offering "unrivaled performance per watt." The platform achieves 2x data processing, compression, and CI/CD performance compared to Grace.

NVIDIA's strategy extends beyond integration into the Vera Rubin platform, with Vera CPUs also being shipped standalone to establish what the company expects will become another multi-billion-dollar business. The Vera CPU is notably the world's first and only data center CPU to utilize LPDDR5 memory. As adoption scales, the demand for LPDDR5X DRAM is expected to swell significantly, given the platform's support for up to 1.5 TB of memory, intensifying constraints across the supply chain. NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform is set for launch in the second half of this week, with mass production of the first racks commencing real soon.