By Jeffrey Kampman
Publication Date: 2026-02-18 11:20:00
Beyond selling its Vera data center CPUs as part of Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale systems, Nvidia has expressed ambitions to become a standalone data center CPU vendor, and a new partnership with hyperscale giant Meta represents a big step forward for that plan.
As part of a new multi-year strategic partnership announced today, Meta says it’ll expand its use of Nvidia tech as it continues to build out hyperscale data centers optimized for its AI training and inference efforts. Those plans include “millions” of Blackwell and Rubin GPUs, part of a massive AI spending plan from Meta that could reach as much as $135 billion in total for 2026.
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Nvidia data center honcho Ian Buck told The Register that Meta is seeing gains of up to 2x the performance per watt on certain workloads with the Grace platform, and that it’s already test-driving Nvidia’s next-gen Vera CPU with “very promising” results. The companies say that large-scale Vera-only deployments could begin as soon as 2027.
For reference, the Grace CPU sports 72 Arm…