Modal is adopting Nvidia Vera CPUs after its internal tests showed twice the throughput of Intel and AMD chips on AI agent workloads.
Nvidia has earned billions selling AI accelerators, but as agentic AI takes hold, CPUs are set to play a much larger role, creating new opportunities for the company. Reuters reports that Nvidia has secured a major design win for its Vera CPUs with AI cloud provider Modal. According to Modal, preliminary evaluations showed that Vera could deliver twice the throughput of its existing AMD and Intel processors. The company does not, however, intend to stop using CPUs from its current suppliers.
Modal provides cloud infrastructure that lets AI developers deploy AI agents capable of performing complex operations autonomously over extended periods. Such workloads require substantial CPU resources for software execution, data processing, and other tasks that GPUs cannot handle efficiently. Modal currently relies exclusively on AMD and Intel processors for these operations, but its tests indicate that Nvidia's new Vera CPUs could significantly improve performance on its specific workloads. Because Vera is based on an Arm instruction set architecture (ISA), adopting it will require substantial changes to Modal's software. Nevertheless, Modal believes the potential performance gains justify the additional engineering effort.
The reported 2x throughput advantage is particularly interesting because agentic AI workloads can involve numerous independent tasks that compete for CPU cores, cache capacity, and memory bandwidth. However, Modal has not disclosed the detailed benchmark configurations it used, the specific AMD and Intel processor models tested, or any performance-per-watt figures. As a result, it remains unclear whether Vera's advantage stems from its Arm v9.2-based Olympus CPU cores, which can decode and execute up to 10 instructions per cycle, its memory subsystem with 1.2 TB/s of bandwidth, or other architectural characteristics. It is also worth noting that the tests compared Vera with currently available AMD and Intel processors, not the upcoming generations that will compete with Vera in the coming years.
Modal cannot port all of its software to Arm overnight, so it will continue using x86 CPUs from AMD and Intel, according to Modal chief executive Erik Bernhardsson. Rather than standardizing on a single ISA, Modal intends to run a heterogeneous server fleet and select the most suitable processor for each workload. The company also plans to evaluate upcoming AMD and Intel processors once they become available.
For Nvidia, the agreement is a major step toward establishing Vera as a standalone server processor that can capture a significant share of the server market. The company expects Vera sales to generate at least $20 billion during its current fiscal year and estimates the total addressable market for these CPUs at approximately $200 billion. Nvidia is on track to sell at least four million Vera CPUs in fiscal 2026.
The announcement follows Modal's recent $750 million funding round, led by Accel, which valued the company at $15.75 billion. Modal expects its annual revenue to reach $1 billion within the next year. Its service consumption has increased 3x over the past 12 months, and revenue has grown more than 15 times compared with the previous year, Reuters reports.