NVIDIA Unveils Vera CPU for AI Agents, Adopted by Perplexity in Bold Move Against Intel and AMD

AI startup Perplexity announced on Tuesday (7th) that it plans to adopt NVIDIA's next-generation Vera CPU, the company's first general-purpose processor built from the ground up specifically for AI agents. This marks a pivotal step in NVIDIA's formal entry into the CPU market long dominated by Intel and AMD. NVIDIA estimates Vera CPU sales could reach $20 billion by the end of the current fiscal year.

Unlike traditional CPUs rooted in laptop and server-era architectures, Vera is custom-designed for the 'continuous computation, uninterrupted task execution' nature of AI agents.

Nate Kupp, Vice President of Enterprise and Infrastructure at Perplexity, noted that Vera executes AI agent coding tasks approximately 1.5 times faster than traditional CPUs, aligning closely with the company's core architecture. Official NVIDIA data shows Vera's core speed increased by 1.8x, enabling up to 85% more evaluation tasks to be completed within the same time window, delivering richer reinforcement learning feedback and effectively shortening model training times.

In a recent blog post, NVIDIA emphasized that slow execution speeds in traditional CPUs lead to inefficient reinforcement learning evaluations, prolonged service times for individual users, and increased computational waste as KV caches are flushed by new requests.

Vera shifts the service metric from pure throughput to 'strictly predictable latency,' reducing per-user service time under stable latency conditions, compressing CPU-side wait times, and alleviating pressure on KV cache eviction. This preserves more computational data and reduces recomputation costs.

Notably, this move comes as leading AI labs like OpenAI begin designing their own AI chips, pressuring NVIDIA to expand its hardware portfolio to maintain its market position.

In addition to Perplexity, NVIDIA revealed that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Oracle also plan to adopt the Vera CPU.

Analysts believe that as AI agents transition from labs to large-scale commercial deployment, demand for specialized CPUs will surge rapidly. If NVIDIA can establish performance and energy efficiency advantages with Vera, it may break into the data center CPU market and reshape the long-standing duopoly of Intel and AMD.