NVIDIA names Anthropic and OpenAI among first users of its Vera chip

Jensen Huang spent a portion of his Computex keynote reading out a guest list. Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX and Oracle, the Nvidia chief executive told the audience in Taipei on Monday, are among the first big users of Vera, the company’s new in-house processor.

Nvidia, a firm that built its empire on graphics chips, would now like to be known for a CPU as well.

Vera is the successor to Grace, Nvidia’s previous data-centre processor, though the company is positioning it as a ground-up redesign rather than an iteration.

It is built around 88 of Nvidia’s own “Olympus” cores, a departure from the off-the-shelf Arm Neoverse cores that powered Grace, and the company says it is now in full production.

The pitch is that Vera is a CPU designed for the age of AI agents, software that plans and executes tasks rather than simply answering a prompt. Nvidia claims the chip completes those agentic workloads faster than the x86 processors made by Intel and AMD, and pairs the cores with up to 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth.

Early independent benchmarks put Vera ahead of Intel’s Xeon and AMD’s EPYC on several measures, which is the comparison Nvidia wants drawn.

The named customers matter as much as the silicon. Anthropic and OpenAI are the two labs whose compute appetite has come to define the current build-out, and Nvidia listing them as launch users is a statement about where the chip is headed.

The first units were hand-delivered in May, according to Nvidia’s own account, before the public announcement in Taipei.

For Nvidia, the CPU is a flank manoeuvre. Its GPUs already sit at the centre of nearly every large AI system, and the data-centre processor has long been the one major component it bought rather than built.

Designing its own removes a dependency and lets the company sell the CPU and GPU as a matched pair, which is the logic behind the Vera Rubin platform Huang has called the largest product launch in the island’s history.

Huang has spent the year describing Taiwan as the “epicentre” of that effort.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is set to be the first hyperscaler to deploy Vera at scale, with broader availability across the other major clouds expected in the second half of 2026. That timeline is the one figure worth watching.

Full production and a podium full of marquee names are easy to announce in June; volume shipments to paying customers are the harder thing, and they are still ahead.

What Nvidia did not say in Taipei was pricing, or how many units any of the named labs have actually committed to. The guest list was read out. The invoices were not.