Nvidia is doing something it has never done before: selling CPUs to Chinese hyperscalers. The company has begun pitching its new Vera CPU to clients in China, opening a revenue channel that sidesteps the export licensing quagmire that has plagued its GPU business for years.
The move is strategic in a way that only Nvidia can pull off. While its most powerful GPUs remain tangled in US export restrictions, CPUs like the Vera are perceived as less restricted, giving the company a cleaner path into one of the world’s largest data center markets.
What the Vera CPU actually is
Unveiled in May 2026, the Vera CPU is Nvidia’s first custom Arm-based processor designed specifically for data center workloads. It packs 88 cores and claims up to 1.8x faster performance than competing x86 platforms.
The chip is purpose-built for what the industry calls “agentic AI workloads,” the kind of computing that powers autonomous AI agents capable of reasoning, planning, and executing multi-step tasks.
