Nvidia has unveiled Vera, a new central processing unit (CPU) designed specifically for the age of agentic artificial intelligence, marking a significant shift in how computing hardware is being built as AI systems evolve from answering questions to independently performing tasks. According to the company, Vera is the world’s first CPU purpose-built for AI agents and reasoning workloads. 

Unlike conventional CPUs that power laptops, desktops, and enterprise servers used directly by humans, Vera is designed to support AI agents that can plan tasks, execute code, access tools, interact with data, and validate outcomes autonomously. Nvidia argues that as agentic AI becomes more sophisticated, the infrastructure supporting these systems will become a critical determinant of performance and cost.

“AI agents will be the largest users of computing infrastructure,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said while unveiling the chip at the COMPUTEX event in Taipei. The company believes the industry is entering a new phase where AI models are transitioning from simply generating responses to taking actions on behalf of users and businesses.

Vera is based on Nvidia’s custom-designed Olympus CPU core architecture and represents the company’s first fully in-house CPU design. The chip features 88 cores and 176 threads, and Nvidia claims it delivers up to 1.8 times the performance of traditional x86 processors used in data centres today. The company has also said the processor can deliver results with twice the efficiency and up to 50% faster performance than conventional rack-scale CPUs for AI-focused workloads.

Who are Vera's customers 

Several major technology companies have already begun evaluating or adopting the platform. Customers exploring the Vera CPU include NYSE, Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceXAI, and hyperscalers ByteDance, CoreWeave, Lambda, Nebius, Nscale and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Vera is also being integrated into AI infrastructure from world-leading system manufacturers such as Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro, along with Taiwan system builders. Vera systems will be available from system builders and cloud partners starting this fall.

“At the NYSE, our focus is to optimize the latency, throughput and reliability of the systems underpinning our unrivaled infrastructure,” said Lynn Martin, president of NYSE Group. “The NYSE processes more than 1.1 trillion messages per day, and in collaboration with Redpanda and HPE, using NVIDIA Vera CPUs, we will be scaling our capacity while further optimising latency to power a high-performance, resilient and AI-ready market infrastructure.”

Anthropic is evaluating adding Vera to scale CPU-intensive agentic workloads. “Scaling compute is an important accelerant for the growth of models,” said James Bradbury, head of compute at Anthropic. “We’re excited to see Vera emerge as a promising part of the ecosystem when solving for agentic workloads.”

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure plans to deploy hundreds of thousands of Vera CPUs beginning this year to support large-scale agentic AI workloads.

The launch comes as Nvidia seeks to expand its addressable market beyond AI accelerators. Huang has described agentic AI as creating a “new CPU moment” for the industry, with Vera positioned as a core building block for the next generation of AI infrastructure.