Nvidia unveils next-gen Vera data center CPU, challenging AMD and Intel

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Publication date: 2026-07-21 15:00:02

• Nvidia became the most valuable company due to insatiable demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs), the primary chips used for AI.
• The chip giant is now selling its own central processing unit (CPU) for AI, called Vera, and has released new information that prospective customers need to fully evaluate it.
• The move into CPUs opens a new battleground in AI servers against AMD and Intel.

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. Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Nvidia became the most valuable company because of insatiable demand for its graphics processing unit (GPU), the primary chip used for creating and deploying artificial intelligence.

But the chip giant is now shipping its own central processing units (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%.

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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.

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 maximize single-core performance, a key metric for AI workloads that require fast, sequential processing.