Nvidia has detailed Vera, its first fully custom CPU, marking a direct challenge to Intel and AMD in cloud and datacentre computing. The Arm-based processor is intended both to manage GPUs in forthcoming Vera Rubin AI systems and to run AI-agent workloads, with its design focused on reducing processing bottlenecks. Several major cloud providers, including Alibaba, Meta, Oracle and CoreWeave, have already committed to deploying it.

A Vera chip contains 88 Armv9.2 Olympus cores and 176 threads, supports up to 1.5TB of LPDDR5X memory, and uses a monolithic 3nm compute die alongside separate memory and I/O chiplets. Nvidia’s dual-socket Vera CPU Superchip combines 176 cores, 3TB of memory and 1.8TB/s of bidirectional NVLink connectivity, while providing 2.4TB/s of aggregate memory bandwidth. Nvidia says a liquid-cooled rack could contain up to 128 Superchips, equating to 22,528 cores and 384TB of memory.