(Credit: Nvidia)
Nvidia had a special delivery for OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic, and Oracle Cloud recently: the first Vera CPU systems.
Nvidia's Ian Buck, VP of hyperscale and performance computing, "hand-delivered the first-ever Nvidia Vera CPUs to our partners at Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, and Oracle Cloud," Nvidia tweeted on Monday. "Vera is Nvidia's first custom CPU, purpose-built for the age of agentic AI. This is just the beginning. The road to Vera-powered systems starts here. Thank you to our partners for being on this journey with us. The best is yet to come."
"Agentic AI is creating a new CPU moment in the AI factory—as models move from answering to acting, Vera is purpose-built to keep that work moving at scale,” Buck said in a statement.
Vera is built from 88 Nvidia Olympus cores, each of which Nvidia claims can deliver up to 50% greater performance than the Grace CPU cores that Nvidia has used in its current-generation Blackwell GPU systems.
Buck made the first delivery of a Vera CPU system to Anthropic, stopping off at its SoMa offices in San Francisco. Then it was off to OpenAI's Mission Bay headquarters, just a short 10-minute drive away, to hand over another Vera system to OpenAI's head of compute infrastructure, Sachi Katti, before an hour-long trip to SpaceX's xAI offices in Palo Alto. There, Buck met up with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. SpaceX is reportedly considering Vera for building new reinforcement learning workloads into its training stack.
(Credit: Nvidia)The final outfit receiving the personal treatment from Nvidia was Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which has already pledged to deploy hundreds of thousands of Nvidia Vera CPUs in 2026. Traveling to the Oracle AI Customer Excellence Center in Sydney, Australia, Buck met with product management lead Karan Batta and chief customer and partner success officer Gary Miller.
Buck suggested Oracle will be able to offer customers "production-grade agentic AI infrastructure," at a scale no other cloud provider can match. Considering the Customer Excellence Center is designed to court Oracle AI customers, Vera will no doubt be a key exhibit for visitors.
But Vera is only one-half of the ultimate Nvidia equation in 2026. As well as standalone deployments, Vera is the host processor for Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 stack, which combines Nvidia's NVLink and twin Rubin GPUs together for a comprehensive, scalable AI solution.
Those CPU and GPU systems are expected to go on sale later this year, completing another Nvidia annual hardware refresh. For gamers who have seen Nvidia and AMD release new chips at a near-annual cadence, I do wonder whether these companies are ready for how quickly this kit can become obsolete.
For now, though, Nvidia is hyping its next CPU and further driving the AI FOMO that has been so prevalent over the past few years.