Nvidia chief unexpectedly acts as a package courier
Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia - The world’s chip giant Nvidia has begun delivering ‘special packages’ to its high-profile clients such as OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic, and Oracle Cloud. The special package is none other than the first Nvidia Vera CPU, touted as the fastest in the world today.
The special package was personally delivered by Nvidia’s chief, the VP of Hyperscale and Performance Computing, Ian Buck. Nvidia disclosed this via a post on X.
“We are delivering the first Nvidia Vera CPU directly to our partners at Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, and Oracle Cloud,” Nvidia wrote, as cited by PCMag, on Wednesday, 20 May 2026.
For information, Vera is Nvidia’s first custom CPU designed to enter the ‘Agentic AI’ era, a next-generation AI system capable of completing complex tasks with little to no human intervention.
“This is only the beginning. The journey towards a Vera-supported system starts here. Thank you to our partners for joining us on this journey. The best is yet to come,” Nvidia wrote.
In his statement, Buck said Vera would play a key role in ushering in the Agentic AI era. The CPU is designed to advance highly capable AI models, not only answering commands, but also taking action and initiating tasks.
Vera is built from 88 Nvidia Olympus cores, each claimed by Nvidia to deliver performance up to 50% higher than the Grace CPU cores used by Nvidia in the Blackwell generation of GPUs.
Buck delivered the first Vera CPU system to Anthropic in San Francisco. He then travelled to OpenAI’s headquarters in Mission Bay, just a ten-minute drive away, to hand over another Vera system to OpenAI’s Head of Compute Infrastructure, Sachi Katti.
Next, he travelled for about an hour to SpaceX’s xAI office in Palo Alto. There, Buck met SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. SpaceX is reportedly considering Vera to build a new reinforcement learning workload into its training stack.
The final recipient of Nvidia’s special treatment is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which has pledged to deploy hundreds of thousands of Nvidia Vera CPUs throughout 2026. On his way to the Oracle AI Customer Excellence Center in Sydney, Australia, Buck met with Product Management Lead Karan Batta and the Head of Customer Success and Partnerships, Gary Miller.
In addition to standalone deployments, Vera is the primary processor for the Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 stack, which combines Nvidia NVLink and two Rubin GPUs for a comprehensive and massive AI solution.
The CPU-GPU system is expected to go on sale later this year, complementing Nvidia’s other annual hardware refreshes.