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Tom's Hardware tested Nvidia's new Vera data center CPU in standalone form against AMD's EPYC Turin and Intel's Granite Rapids-AP chips. Vera posted leading results in Python performance and memory bandwidth, and also held its own in general-purpose server workloads, though x86 rivals retained an edge in core-density-driven frontend tasks.
Nvidia and Oracle announced general availability of Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 racks and standalone Vera CPU instances on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Superclusters at Oracle AI World. The move follows Google Cloud's similar Vera Rubin availability announcement last week. Separately, independent benchmarks on a Vera server (not run on OCI hardware) showed significantly higher memory bandwidth than a dual Xeon 6 system.
SpaceX disclosed a binding commitment for about $40 billion in financing to acquire AI chips and data center hardware, calling it the largest committed GPU financing deal to date. An Apollo-managed entity will purchase the equipment and lease it back to SpaceX for roughly five years, with the deal expected to close by year-end and leases beginning in early 2027 as equipment arrives.
Nvidia introduced the DSX Pod AI Factory, a shipping-container-sized unit holding seven Vera Rubin AI racks that weighs about 28,000 kilograms and can be transported by truck. The pods arrive pre-assembled with cabling and liquid cooling, requiring only placement, connection and testing on-site, which Nvidia says cuts data center setup time from six months to 14 days. Manufacturing partners including Foxconn, Gigabyte, Lenovo, HPE, Quanta and Pegatron will build the units, with deliveries starting in early 2027.
Nscale is negotiating a new agreement with Anthropic worth roughly $45 billion to supply AI computing capacity, according to a source cited by Reuters. The deal would cover a second building at Nscale's Monarch data center campus in West Virginia, providing 460 megawatts of power using Nvidia's upcoming Vera Rubin chips. This follows an earlier $45 billion deal struck in August for the same campus's first facility.
AI cloud provider Modal has agreed to deploy Nvidia's new Arm-based Vera CPUs after preliminary internal testing showed roughly double the throughput of its existing AMD and Intel processors for agentic AI workloads. Modal says it will continue using its current CPU suppliers alongside Vera, rather than replacing them outright.
Intel announced at OCP 2026 that its previously code-named Crescent Island chip will ship as the GPU D-Series, disclosing a theoretical peak of 1.3 PFLOPS FP8 performance and 1.5 TB/s memory bandwidth. The air-cooled PCIe card runs at 350W TDP with up to 480GB of LPDDR5X memory, built on Intel's new Xe3P architecture, and can scale to eight GPUs per server.
OpenAI is deploying its new Jalapeño AI chip in racks alongside AMD's EPYC Turin CPUs, each configured with 1.5TB of memory, rather than Nvidia's newer Vera processor. Richard Ho, OpenAI's VP and Head of Hardware, told Tom's Hardware that Turin was chosen for pragmatic reasons, calling Vera 'a little bit behind' in maturity and noting partners already had experience with AMD's chip.
AMD released a white paper expanding on its earlier performance claims for the upcoming EPYC 'Venice' server CPUs, reiterating that a 96-core Venice chip is about 20% faster per-core than Nvidia's 88-core Vera on SPEC CPU 2026's Integer Rate test. The paper also details throughput results showing the 256-core EPYC 9996 outperforming Intel's Xeon 6980P by 2.37x and Vera by 2.24x, plus a 78% generational gain over the prior 192-core EPYC 9965.
Elon Musk revealed on SpaceX's latest earnings call that the company's Starmind AI project will run on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin GPU architecture, both on the ground and eventually in orbit. Musk argued the NVL72 VR system design outperforms traditional rack-based computing setups and would be cheaper and more effective for SpaceX's needs.