By Katie Tarasov
Publication Date: 2026-03-13 19:00:00
Nvidia showed CNBC its latest Vera CPU at its Santa Clara, California, headquarters on Feb. 13, 2026.
Marc Ganley | CNBC
Nvidia‘s graphics processing units have been the hottest-selling chips for years, but the sudden advent of agentic artificial intelligence has brought on a renaissance for its more modest host chip, the central processing unit.
Now, Nvidia is poised to unveil new details about its agentic-optimized CPUs at its annual GTC conference that kicks off on Monday, with a CPU-only rack likely to appear on the showroom floor.
“CPUs are becoming the bottleneck in terms of growing out this AI and agentic workflow,” Dion Harris, Nvidia’s head of AI infrastructure, told CNBC this week, calling it an “exciting opportunity.”
The chip giant announced its first data center CPU, Grace, in 2021, and the next generation, Vera, is now in production. The CPUs are typically deployed alongside Nvidia’s famous Hopper, Blackwell or Rubin GPUs in full rack-scale systems.
Exploding demand for GPUs has turned Nvidia into a household name and the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, with a $4.4 trillion market cap. Its broader chip strategy took a major turn in February, when Nvidia struck a multiyear deal with Meta that included the first large-scale deployment of Grace CPUs on their own, with plans to deploy Vera in 2027.
Thousands of standalone Nvidia CPUs are also helping power supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center and Los Alamos National Lab, Nvidia…
