Modal Plans to Add Nvidia Vera CPUs to Its AI Cloud

Modal plans to add Nvidia’s Vera central processors to its cloud fleet for hosting AI agents, after the company’s preliminary tests found roughly twice the throughput of the Intel and AMD processors it tested. The deployment would mark Modal’s first use of a processor outside the x86 systems it has relied on, but the company says it will continue operating chips from its existing suppliers alongside Vera. The reported performance result comes from Modal’s own evaluations and has not been independently verified. Modal said Vera completed about twice as much work on its agent workloads as the tested Intel and AMD processors. The result is specific to the company’s tests; the available reporting does not establish how it would translate to other workloads or configurations. Modal’s benchmark account describes tests of agent sandboxes, which run software tasks for AI agents. Its benchmark included 50 TerminalBench oracle solutions and verifiers, and measured both individual task completion and concurrent throughput. Modal said Vera maintained its advantage under load, attributing the result to memory bandwidth and the ability to run more container workloads concurrently per core....