Nvidia pitches Vera CPU to Chinese cloud customers August availability orders open after H200 export controls
Nvidia $NVDA is selling around US export controls. It is pitching Chinese cloud giants on its new Vera CPU, an Arm-based 88-core chip, saying deliveries could start in August and orders can begin now. The pitch leaves out the GPU that draws regulatory scrutiny.
Nvidia $NVDA is trying to hold onto its China business by changing what it sells there. The company is pitching Chinese cloud customers on its new Vera CPU, telling them the chips could be available as soon as August and that orders can be placed now. Vera is an Arm-based 88-core processor built for agentic AI workloads, unveiled in March 2026 and now in full production. A single Vera chip will cost well north of $20,000 before bulk discounts, and a fully configured rack of 256 chips would run around $10 million. The strategy is shaped entirely by US export policy. After Washington's controls stalled shipments of Nvidia's H200 AI chips, the company is now leading with the CPU on its own, precisely because the GPU component is what tends to draw regulatory scrutiny. Among the hyperscalers Nvidia is reported to be approaching are Alibaba and ByteDance, neither of which commented, and at least one major Chinese cloud company is said to be planning an initial test order before any larger commitment. The episode shows how chipmakers are redesigning their China playbook around the boundaries of export rules, isolating the parts they can still sell from the parts they cannot.