In 2026, the server CPU market is once again a battlefield.
On October 19, Modal, a US AI cloud provider, announced plans to adopt Nvidia’s new-generation Vera CPU to run AI agent workloads. Until now, the company’s CPU infrastructure has relied on x86 processors from Intel and AMD. With Vera, Nvidia is trying to pry open a market long held by the traditional CPU giants.
Nvidia() is not the only newcomer. In March, Arm, long focused on IP licensing, launched its first self-designed data center processor, the AGI CPU, stepping from behind the scenes into the spotlight.
Suddenly, a server CPU market once dominated by Intel and AMD has two formidable new competitors in Nvidia and Arm. Faced with this compute tsunami triggered by agents, what exactly is this new round of carving up the CPU market really about?