Chips · Oct 20, 2026, 15:09
NVIDIA Vera CPU Hits 2x x86 Throughput in Modal Agent Tests
Modal will add NVIDIA's Arm-based Vera CPU to its AI agent sandboxes after early tests showed up to double the throughput of an Intel x86 server under load.
NVIDIA's Vera CPU rack.
Image: NVIDIA
Source · NVIDIA Newsroom press image, for editorial use · License
San Francisco, Oct. 19 — Modal, the AI cloud company valued at $15.75 billion last week, said on Monday it will add NVIDIA's Arm-based Vera CPU to the servers behind its Sandboxes product after early tests showed up to twice the task throughput of an equivalent Intel x86 machine. NVIDIA hand-delivered Modal's first Vera server to its San Francisco office last week.
Sandboxes are isolated containers where AI agents and reinforcement learning jobs run code that models write. Modal has so far run that work only on Intel and AMD x86 chips, and it will keep them in a mixed fleet alongside Vera.
The Technical Details
Modal built its own test, Agentless Agent Bench: 50 Terminal-Bench tasks such as compiling code, searching files and running git operations, stripped of network calls and run inside concurrent Docker containers. Run one at a time on an idle machine, Vera was often faster than the other CPUs, but not always and not by a large margin.
The gap opened under load. As Modal packed more containers onto each host, rival chips hit throughput plateaus while Vera kept finishing tasks at close to its unloaded pace. Modal credits Vera's high memory bandwidth, which lets more containers share each core without throttling.
