Nvidia Vera Doubled Throughput — Modal's First Step Off x86
By TechPulse USA Newsroom | October 20, 2026 Nvidia is not content selling you the GPU anymore. It wants the CPU under it, the memory around it, and — if this week is any indication — the loyalty of the clouds that run on top of it. On Monday, Modal, the $15.75 billion AI infrastructure startup, revealed that it measured up to double the task throughput from Nvidia's new Vera CPU against a comparable Intel machine in its own sandbox benchmark, and is now planning to do something it has never done before: put an Arm chip into its fleet. Modal's entire history has been x86 — Intel and AMD, nothing else. Adding a third architecture means retooling its infrastructure and image-build system, the kind of thankless engineering that nobody volunteers for. Which makes the decision itself more interesting than the benchmark. A company with a $300-million-a-year sandbox business just told the world it believes an Nvidia CPU is worth the pain. Jensen Huang on stage at a keynote (file...