Delivering Vera: NVIDIA’s First CPU Built for Agents Is Shipping Now

Delivering Vera: NVIDIA’s First CPU Built for Agents Is Shipping Now | NVIDIA Blog

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Delivering Vera: NVIDIA’s First CPU Built for Agents Is Shipping Now

NVIDIA Vice President of Hyperscale and HPC Ian Buck hand-delivers Vera CPU systems across the AI ecosystem as Vera begins shipping at scale.

August 27, 2026 by Ian Finder

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Editor’s Note: This blog, originally published on May 18, 2026, was updated on Thursday, Aug. 27, 2026.

AWS and NVIDIA announced yesterday a major expansion of their 16-year collaboration, including plans for 2 million additional NVIDIA GPUs and work to bring Vera CPU -based infrastructure to AWS.

AWS has received its first NVIDIA Vera CPU server and Vera Rubin GPU, hand-delivered in Seattle by NVIDIA Vice President of Hyperscale and HPC Ian Buck.

AWS is the latest stop in Vera’s rapid journey across the AI ecosystem. Previously, Buck delivered Vera CPU systems to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and three leading AI labs: Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceXAI.

“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.

Why Vera, Why Now

The big idea: imagine you could work 10x faster. Could your computer keep up? Agentic AI puts more demand than ever on the infrastructure people use to do all kinds of work — from building slides to compiling and testing software, analyzing data, searching files or even running simulations.

AI agents don’t run on GPUs alone. Every agentic sandbox, every tool call, every orchestration layer, every long-context retrieval operation — that’s CPU work. Vera is a new class of CPU designed with that reality as its starting point.

This gauntlet of concurrent, real-time tasks puts pressure on CPUs in ways traditional core-density-focused designs were never built to prioritize. Vera packs 88 custom NVIDIA-designed Olympus cores, 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth and delivers up to 1.8x faster per-core performance on agentic AI workloads. Under constant load, work completes more quickly — increasing the efficiency of the entire AI factory and helping users get their work done with faster responses.

NVIDIA Vera is heading to @awscloud .

NVIDIA’s Ian Buck hand-delivered AWS’s first Vera CPU Server and Vera Rubin GPU to Willem Visser and Supreeth Sheshadri at the AWS HQ in Seattle.

Vera is purpose-built for agentic AI: more tokens per dollar, faster results for users, and… pic.twitter.com/btcw2gz42x

— NVIDIA (@nvidia) August 27, 2026

From Announcement to Arrival: Vera Heads to AWS

Buck rolled AWS’ first Vera CPU server and Vera Rubin GPU past the Spheres in Seattle and handed them off to Willem Visser, vice president of Amazon EC2 at AWS. They were joined by Supreeth Sheshardi, vice president of Amazon EC2 hardware engineering, and dove into the details of what Vera and Vera Rubin will bring to AWS customers.

NVIDIA’s Ian Buck hand-delivered the first-ever NVIDIA Vera CPUs to our partners @AnthropicAI , @OpenAI , @SpaceX , and @OracleCloud . 🎉

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… pic.twitter.com/Ep5PLqcqIa

— NVIDIA (@nvidia) May 18, 2026

Vera Comes Home to the South Bay and OCI I nside the Oracle AI Customer Excellence Center, a team from OCI, including Karan Batta , who leads overall product management, and Gary Miller, chief customer and partner success officer, took a tour of the unboxed Vera CPU system. In the background, an NVIDIA GPU rack spun through OCI customer workloads from around the globe. The center is where Oracle customers come to kick the tires on a variety of AI workloads.

Buck explained how Vera will help.

“When AI models are posed a question, the answer, often, isn’t already prepped and ready to go. The models actually have to generate some Python code to arrive at the correct answer,” Buck said, explaining a task at which the Vera CPU excels. “That’s why we are seeing the demand for CPUs skyrocket.”

This is a trend the OCI team was also witnessing.

“OCI plans to deploy hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA Vera CPUs beginning in 2026 because agentic AI demands sustained performance at massive scale,” Batta said. “Vera’s architecture is purpose-built for high-throughput reasoning workloads, delivering the efficiency, density and footprint OCI needs to power the next generation of enterprise AI.”

OCI is the first cloud provider to deploy Vera at hyperscale. For enterprise customers, that means production-grade agentic AI infrastructure at a scale no other cloud provider can match today.

The OCI team was eager to put Vera to work, offering their customers another system to customize and validate their agentic AIs and workloads, Miller said. “I am really looking forward to the reaction of people who come through here, and working together to get the most from Vera,” he said.

On the Peninsula With SpaceXAI

In May, the day’s final AI lab delivery took place at SpaceXAI’s offices in Palo Alto.

NVIDIA’s team walked Elon Musk through the system’s interior. Musk listened, then started asking questions — about cores, about memory layout, about cooling.

SpaceXAI is evaluating Vera for reinforcement learning workloads and the agent-based simulation pipelines that drive its training stack.

Previewing at OpenAI At OpenAI’s Mission Bay headquarters, the handoff moved outside — to an open-air balcony off the main offices.

The famously moody San Francisco weather cooperated on this day as Sachin Katti, head of compute infrastructure at OpenAI, thanked Buck for bringing the server over.

Buck walked through Vera’s features and, at one point — retrieving a screwdriver from his pocket — pulled off the lid to reveal the system’s insides.

Vera Heads to San Francisco and Anthropic The first May delivery landed at Anthropic’s sleek SoMa offices in San Francisco.

James Bradbury, Anthropic’s head of compute, took the handoff from their conference room near the Bay.

Buck, aided by a bare NVIDIA Vera CPU motherboard he carried as a guide, walked Bradbury through the server built around the new CPU, talking through the features that make Vera different.

“Scaling compute is an important accelerant for the growth of models,” Bradbury said. “We’re excited to see Vera emerge as a promising part of the ecosystem when solving for agentic workloads.”

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