Nvidia has spent years dominating the GPU market. Now it wants a piece of the CPU business — and it’s lining up customers fast.
AI search startup Perplexity confirmed Tuesday it will deploy Nvidia’s Vera CPU in its production systems. The decision came after internal tests showed Vera completed AI agent coding tasks roughly 1.5 times faster than traditional processors. In some testing environments, Vera ran up to 1.9 times quicker.
Perplexity VP of Computer Enterprise and Infrastructure Nate Kupp put it plainly: “Vera really stood out to us as just like a dead-on fit for a lot of the core workloads that we have.”
Perplexity didn’t say how many Vera chips it plans to buy, but the adoption adds another name to a growing list of early customers that includes OpenAI, Anthropic, and Oracle.
Traditional CPUs were designed with human users in mind — people who take breaks, switch tasks, and don’t run processes around the clock. AI agents don’t work that way.
Vera was built with 88 custom Olympus cores and is engineered for strong single-core performance and faster memory access. It uses less energy than comparable chips, making it well-suited for the kind of long-running, continuous AI workloads that companies like Perplexity depend on.
The chip performed well on practical tests too — Perplexity put it through tasks like copying code repositories and running software tests, the kind of real-world jobs that matter more than synthetic benchmarks.
Vera puts Nvidia directly in the path of Intel and AMD, who have long supplied CPUs for everything from laptops to enterprise servers. That’s a $200 billion market.
Intel dropped 9.66% and AMD fell 6.51% as the Perplexity news drew attention to Nvidia’s growing CPU ambitions. Nvidia is targeting around $20 billion in Vera revenue by the end of its fiscal year — a number that would be a serious opening move in that market.
Nvidia has already placed Vera systems with major cloud and AI players including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. With Perplexity now on board, Nvidia is building out its CPU customer base while its GPU rivals like OpenAI — which recently launched its own AI chip called Jalapeño in partnership with Broadcom — push into Nvidia’s territory from the other side.
NVDA currently trades around $196. Wall Street analysts tracked by TipRanks rate the stock a Strong Buy, with 36 out of 37 analysts recommending a Buy. The 12-month average price target sits at $309.33, implying upside of around 57%.
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