AI startup Perplexity announced Tuesday that it intends to adopt Nvidia’s newly developed central processing unit, as the chip giant makes a bold push to expand its market reach and challenge long-established competitors Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
Nvidia has projected it will bring in $20 billion in revenue from its “Vera” CPU — a general-purpose computing chip distinct from its AI-specific products — before the close of its current fiscal year. The Vera chip is part of a broader strategy by Nvidia to diversify its business as major artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI and DeepSeek develop their own in-house AI chips.
The CPU market has historically been dominated by Intel and AMD, whose chips power everything from personal laptops to large-scale web servers. However, most of those chips were engineered before the emergence of AI “agents” — software systems capable of independently completing complex tasks based on instructions given by human users.
Unlike people, who naturally pause between tasks, AI agents operate continuously. Perplexity’s Vice President for Computer Enterprise and Infrastructure, Nate Kupp, noted that Nvidia’s CPU completed AI agent coding assignments roughly 1.5 times faster than conventional chips.
“Vera really stood out to us as just like a dead-on fit for a lot of the core workloads that we have,” Kupp said in an interview.
Perplexity did not reveal the number of Nvidia CPUs it intends to purchase. Nvidia has separately confirmed that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Oracle have also committed to using its new CPU.
