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Nvidia lands Modal as first Vera CPU customer beyond x86 incumbents

The shift matters because Modal tested the chip against its own Intel and AMD gear and still rewired its software stack to use it.

• Modal, which raised $750M led by Accel at a $15.75B valuation last week, said Monday it will begin running Nvidia's new Vera CPU for AI agent workloads, having previously relied exclusively on Intel and AMD chips.
• Modal, co-founded in 2021 by Erik Bernhardsson and Akshat Bubna, sells serverless cloud infrastructure that lets developers run and scale AI applications without managing their own servers; customers include DoorDash and Cognition.
• Modal built a 50-task coding benchmark and found Nvidia's Vera chip completed up to twice as many tasks as its existing Intel servers, prompting the switch.
• Modal will run Vera chips alongside its existing Intel and AMD fleet in a mixed setup, routing each workload to whichever hardware performs best rather than replacing suppliers outright.
• Modal's valuation rose from $1.1B in September 2025 to $4.65B in May 2026 to $15.75B now, as usage tripled since May and revenue grew more than 15x year-over-year, crossing a $1B annualized run rate.
• Nvidia expects at least $20B in Vera chip sales this fiscal year as it targets a CPU market it values at roughly $200B, with OpenAI, Anthropic, Oracle and Perplexity also named as adopters.
• Modal's switch is an early signal that Nvidia's push into server CPUs, a market long dominated by Intel and AMD, is gaining real traction among fast-growing AI infrastructure customers.