Nvidia Vera draws cloud providers and AI sandbox workloads

Nvidia’s Arm-based Vera CPU is gaining early adopters among European cloud providers and companies building AI infrastructure. Unveiled in March, the processor has 88 cores and targets AI agent infrastructure and data processing workloads as an alternative to x86 chips from Intel and AMD.

Modal plans to shift its Sandboxes product to Vera. Its internal benchmarks across 50 coding tasks showed the processor matching or beating chips from Intel, AMD and Amazon. Modal reported gains of up to 2x when many containers ran on a server, attributing the improvement to higher memory bandwidth. Those results have not been independently verified.

Sandboxes generates $300M a year for Modal, making the planned migration significant for its business. Other early Vera adopters include Anthropic, OpenAI and Perplexity, alongside European cloud providers Nebius, Nscale and Verda.