Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks next to a Vera Rubin Ultra Kyber compute tray and a Vera Rubin Ultra Kyber NVLink midplane during a keynote address at the Nvidia GTC conference in San Jose, California, March 16, 2026.
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Nvidia became the most valuable company because of insatiable demand for its graphics processing unit, or GPU, the primary chip used for creating and deploying artificial intelligence.
But the chip giant is now shipping its own central processing units, or CPUs, which cloud providers could decide to deploy in place of those from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel, opening up a new battleground in AI servers.
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.
Nvidia is seen as the company that sets the direction for the information technology industry. But in CPUs, Nvidia is the challenger once again, competing against two well-established players in Intel and AMD, which have deep ties to hyperscalers and cloud giants.
The company’s investment in CPUs is another example of Nvidia’s strategy to vertically integrate its systems and produce more of the chips and technology inside them every year. It aims to sell the entire system as a full rack of computing power, instead of simply selling chips by themselves.
It’s a strategy that Nvidia says will help engineers squeeze more performance out of their GPUs, helping the company’s systems remain the computers of choice for leading AI labs as competition from AMD and custom chips heats up.
Before the AI boom, the CPU was the most important and most expensive part in a server. The first generation of AI servers available when ChatGPT was released in 2022 paired as many as eight GPUs to one CPU, signaling a shift towards Nvidia’s GPUs.
But the rise of agentic AI, which can run independently in the background with minimal human input, has returned attention to the CPU, which is needed to babysit and feed data to an agent. Financial markets have noticed, and CPU incumbents AMD and Intel are among the two best-performing chip stocks so far in 2026, up 128% and 149% respectively, besting Nvidia’s rise of 8%.
Nvidia, AMD and Intel stock chart.
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.”
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.
Gartner analyst Kevin Knox said that AMD is currently the company to beat in enterprise AI server CPUs. AMD reportedly holds about 33% of the market for server CPUs, and Intel has 66.8%, but AMD is gaining share and has deep relationships with hyperscalers.
“AMD’s done a great job building their ecosystem around their chips,” Knox said.
Nvidia’s Vera chip configured on a motherboard.
Kif Leswing/CNBC
Single-core performance
Nvidia said last week that Vera is the first server CPU that it has designed from the core, as opposed to using an off-the-shelf design provided by Arm, which requires less engineering work.
The company said Vera was specifically designed to address bottlenecks in AI agents, and that its chip has 50% better performance for AI agents than x86 chips, the type of silicon that Intel and AMD make.
That’s because previous CPUs for clouds from Intel and AMD focused on core count, but Nvidia’s chip and Olympus core focuses on single-core speed instead, Nvidia said.
Hannah Coutand, a Vera product marketer at Nvidia, said in a presentation that the chip focused on per-core speed, high memory bandwidth, and latency, “so that agents can return to their GPUs as quickly as possible and keep those GPUs, which are a very expensive and a highly valuable asset in the AI factory, as highly utilized as possible.”
The company said that it will sell the chip by itself, in addition to being paired with the company’s GPUs. It will also come in a liquid-cooled rack of 256 Vera chips tied together, as well as a configuration with two Vera chips in a single server. It will also be available paired with Nvidia’s GPUs in a system called Vera Rubin.
The CPU is power-hungry, using between 250 watts and 450 watts of power. The chip also uses a huge amount of low-power memory, the same kind used in laptops and phones, supporting up to 1.5 terabytes of memory per chip.
Some analysts have said that Nvidia has created a new class of CPUs that Intel and AMD don’t have a response to yet. Cambrian AI Research founder Karl Freund said Nvidia’s new CPU won’t be used to serve websites or other traditional server tasks, but will be reserved for intense AI tasks.
But getting the cloud providers to buy the chips could still be a challenge, even for Nvidia.
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.
“The CPU is something they’ve done to kind of unhook their customers from using Intel or AMD CPUs, and they covet that revenue,” said Freund. “What they’ve done is they decided to focus on a unique CPU that isn’t available in the market from anyone right now.”
