Nvidia Opens Vera CPU Sales to China — August Delivery as GPU Exports Stay Frozen

Nvidia has begun pitching its new Vera CPU to major Chinese cloud companies, with orders expected to ship as early as August 2026 — marking a significant pivot in strategy as U.S. export controls have frozen the company's high-end GPU sales to China and left a gap in its China revenue.

According to multiple reports citing sources familiar with the discussions, at least one major Chinese tech company is planning to order more than 300 servers, each equipped with two Vera processors, for initial testing. Alibaba and ByteDance have both been identified as early contacts in the sales outreach. A single Vera CPU is priced well above $20,000, with a fully configured 256-chip rack estimated at around $10 million. Nvidia projects the Vera line could generate approximately $20 billion in revenue by the end of its fiscal year in January 2027.

What Vera Is — and Why It Sidesteps Export Controls

The Vera CPU is Nvidia's first standalone, Arm-based processor engineered specifically for agentic AI workloads: code execution, reinforcement learning, data analytics, and inference control tasks that require sustained compute over time rather than raw parallel throughput. Nvidia claims it delivers up to 1.8x faster performance for agentic AI compared to rival processors.

Critically, CPUs face significantly fewer U.S. export restrictions than Nvidia's high-performance GPUs. The H100 and H200 GPUs — the hardware driving most frontier AI training globally — have been blocked from Chinese sale since 2022 export controls and follow-on rules. The Vera CPU does not fall under the same prohibited categories, allowing Nvidia to resume meaningful shipments to Chinese buyers without triggering regulatory violation.

The catch: initial Chinese deployments are expected to happen in overseas data centers rather than on Chinese soil, reflecting ongoing regulatory uncertainty and Beijing's parallel push for domestic chip self-sufficiency through companies like Huawei and Cambricon.

The Strategic Picture

China was historically Nvidia's second-largest market — roughly 20-25% of revenue before export controls cut deeply into GPU shipments. The Vera CPU play is a way to maintain commercial relationships and generate revenue from Chinese customers without violating the letter of current restrictions.

For Chinese cloud providers, the calculus is also practical: domestic AI chip alternatives exist but lag Nvidia's performance on most benchmarks, and Vera offers a path to deploying capable agentic AI infrastructure while the domestic chip ecosystem matures. H200 sales remain frozen, and there is no indication the Commerce Department is moving toward relaxing GPU export rules.

Nvidia declined to comment directly on the China CPU sales discussions. As reported by Tom's Hardware and TrendForce, orders are expected to open in August with initial deliveries to follow shortly after.