Nvidia preps to sell its Vera CPUs into China as its GPU sales stay frozen — customers encouraged to place orders for CPU shipments as early as August

Nvidia has told Chinese clients that its Arm-based Vera server CPUs could be available as soon as August and that orders can be placed now, Reuters reports, citing three sources familiar with the matter. Meanwhile, shipments of H200 AI GPUs to China remain frozen, months after CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia’s market share in the country had effectively fallen to zero.

This August timeline runs in sync with what was said at GTC Taipei during Computex, when Nvidia indicated that Vera systems would reach customers through system builders and cloud partners starting this fall. Telling Chinese buyers they can have silicon in August, during a global server CPU shortage, suggests they’re sitting near the front of the allocation queue for a product line Nvidia expects to generate $20 billion in revenue by the end of its fiscal year in late January.

According to the report, Chinese cloud companies are already testing more than 300 Vera servers, and at least one major cloud provider plans to place an order. Initial deployments will be restricted to those companies' overseas data centers, one of the sources said.

If this goes ahead, Vera will reach Chinese buyers where Nvidia’s GPUs can’t. Server CPUs face far lighter U.S. export restrictions than the accelerators that underpin Nvidia's data center business, and the company's recent history in China shows that Washington is no longer the only obstacle. The U.S. licensed roughly 10 Chinese firms to buy the H200, but not a single unit has been delivered because Chinese officials, intent on nurturing domestic chipmakers, withheld approval on their side.

That dynamic helps to explain why the deployment of Vera CPUs will be restricted to overseas data centers: Chinese cloud providers want the hardware, but putting U.S. silicon into domestic data centers will obviously invite scrutiny and potential action from Beijing officials.

Vera began life as the CPU half of the Vera Rubin superchip, first shown at last year’s GTC event. Nvidia broke it out as a standalone product at GTC San Jose this March, launching it alongside a rack design that packs in 256 liquid-cooled Vera CPUs and sustains more than 22,500 concurrent CPU environments. Then, at Computex, Nvidia said the chip had entered full production, claiming 1.8 times faster task completion than x86 processors on agentic workloads. Its predecessor, Grace, has shipped nearly 2.5 million units to date.

Meanwhile, server CPUs are being tightly squeezed by the shift of AI workloads from training toward inference and agentic execution. Agentic AI leans heavily on host processors for tool calls, code execution, and data handling, and CPU demand has outrun supply as a result of the agentic explosion.

Intel has quoted Chinese customers lead times of up to six months, while AMD has said that the global CPU market is tight, with demand outpacing its forecasts and supply constraints expected to persist.

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