Nvidia has told Chinese clients that its new “Vera” central processors for Artificial Intelligence data centres could be available as soon as August and that they can begin placing orders, according to people familiar with the discussions. The outreach reflects a rapid pivot toward the product as shipments of its H200 Artificial Intelligence chip to China have stalled for months. Jensen Huang said in October that Nvidia’s market share in China has effectively fallen to zero, hurt by U.S. export controls on advanced chips and Beijing’s push for self-reliance in key technologies.
The move also raises the stakes in its competition with major central processor firms Intel and AMD, which are racing to increase supplies of server CPUs for Artificial Intelligence data centres. Some Chinese clients have shown interest in Vera, Nvidia’s first standalone central processing unit built for agentic Artificial Intelligence, or systems that perform tasks autonomously. Now in full production, the Vera chip is built for the behind-the-scenes computing that Artificial Intelligence agents rely on, and Nvidia says it runs up to 1.8 times faster than comparable processors from its rivals. Unveiling Vera in March, Huang expected it to become the company’s next multibillion-dollar business.
One major Chinese cloud company plans to place an order for more than 300 servers, each containing two Vera CPUs, one of the people said. The company plans to deploy the systems for testing first and decide whether to place official orders based on the results, the person added. Whether that initial interest translates into large-scale adoption remains uncertain, partly because of software ecosystems and compatibility, as well as constraints tied to migrating workloads built around domestic Artificial Intelligence chips.
A single Vera processor will cost “well north” of $20,000 before bulk discounts, and a fully configured rack of 256 chips would run to around $10mn, depending on memory chip configuration, according to SemiAnalysis. Nvidia expects $20bn in revenue from Vera chip sales by the end of this fiscal year to end-January. The Chinese interest in Vera comes as the global Artificial Intelligence race pivots from model training to inference computing, the process of answering queries, where graphics processors face greater competition from central processors and custom chips. Intel has notified Chinese customers of server CPU delivery lead times of up to six months, Reuters reported in February, while AMD has said the global CPU market is “tight.” Chinese clients plan to initially deploy Vera chips only in their overseas data centres for testing, one of the people said.
