By Hamza Faisal
Nvidia's push into the central processor business just scored its most meaningful win yet. Modal, the fast-growing AI cloud startup that rents computing power to AI developers, said Monday it will start using Nvidia's new Vera central processor to host AI agents — the first time it has adopted a CPU design from anyone other than Intel or AMD.
The decision came down to test results. Modal said early testing showed Vera doubling the amount of work its AI agents could get done, convincing the company to support Nvidia's chip design even though it will require deep software changes on Modal's side. The news was reported by Reuters on October 19.
Double the throughput, deep software changes
Modal hosts agents — AI systems that carry out long-running tasks on behalf of human users — on large pools of CPUs, and until now it had run that work exclusively on Intel and AMD silicon. Under heavy concurrent load, Vera delivered up to twice the throughput of comparable x86 hardware, according to Modal's own early-test figures. That margin was enough to justify rewiring its software stack around a new chip architecture.
The timing is notable. Modal raised $750 million last week in a funding round led by Accel that valued the startup at $15.75 billion. The company says usage of its services has tripled and revenue has grown more than 15 times year-over-year, putting it on track to record $1 billion in sales over the next year.
A mixed fleet — Intel and AMD stay in rotation
Chief executive Erik Bernhardsson was careful to stress that Modal is not abandoning its existing suppliers. The company will run Nvidia chips alongside its current Intel and AMD offerings in a mixed fleet, putting each job on whatever hardware runs it best. "We can always deploy whatever hardware performs best," Bernhardsson said. On future Nvidia parts, he was similarly non-committal: "We'll test them when they're available."
He noted the tests were run against the Intel and AMD chips already on the market, and that both rivals are developing newer models that could narrow the gap with Nvidia.
Why Vera matters for Nvidia's CPU ambitions
Vera is Nvidia's Arm-compatible CPU, built for its Vera Rubin platform but also offered as a standalone server processor. Nvidia has told investors it expects at least $20 billion in Vera revenue this fiscal year in a CPU market it values at roughly $200 billion.
Modal's adoption is symbolically significant: an Intel-and-AMD-only startup deciding Nvidia's design is worth deep software investment is an early sign that Nvidia's CPU push has traction in a market the two incumbents have long controlled. If early tests hold up in production, Vera could find itself renting cores to the AI boom's biggest workloads.
