Perplexity has become one of the first big AI names to say it will build on Nvidia’s new Vera CPU, the general-purpose chip Nvidia is betting can carry it beyond the accelerators that made it the world’s most valuable company. The AI search firm said it plans to run its agent workloads on Vera, joining an early group of adopters Nvidia is keen to show off.
Vera is the processor half of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, an Arm-based design with dozens of custom cores built to feed the company’s next generation of accelerators.
It is also Nvidia’s clearest move yet into the market for ordinary server processors, a space long dominated by Intel and AMD, and it arrives with Nvidia having already named Anthropic and OpenAI among its first users.
Perplexity’s pitch for the chip is speed on a specific job. Nate Kupp, the company’s vice-president of enterprise infrastructure, said Vera ran agentic coding tasks about 1.5 times faster than the traditional CPUs Perplexity had been using, calling its single-threaded performance a close fit for the work.
That work is not small. Perplexity now handles more than 400 million search queries a month, each one running through an inference pipeline that has leaned on Nvidia hardware, including H100 GPUs and the company’s Triton and TensorRT software, from early on.
