Nvidia announced more details about its new 88-core Vera data center CPUs at GTC 2026 here in San Jose, California, claiming impressive 50% performance gains over standard CPUs, fueled by a 1.5X increase in IPC from its Olympus cores and an innovative high-bandwidth design that Nvidia says delivers the fastest single-threaded performance on the market. The company also unveiled its new Vera CPU Rack architecture, which brings 256 liquid-cooled CPUs into one rack for CPU-centric workloads, claiming a 6X gain in CPU throughput and twice the performance in agentic AI workloads.
The evolution of the Vera CPU and its integration into deployable rack-scale systems marks Nvidia’s entry into direct CPU sales, positioning itself as a competitor to Intel and AMD in the traditional CPU market. That’s not to mention competing against the many flavors of custom Arm processors used by the world’s largest hyperscalers. This doesn’t come as a complete surprise, coming in the wake of the company’s announcement that Meta will now deploy multiple generations of Nvidia CPU-only systems across its infrastructure. Nvidia will also continue to use the CPUs for its own GPU-focused systems, such as the Vera Rubin platform we covered more in depth here.
