Modal moves agent sandboxes onto Nvidia Vera CPUs, its first step off x86

Modal will run its sandboxes, the isolated machines where AI agents execute code they write, on Nvidia's Arm-based Vera CPU. Its benchmark used 50 coding tasks such as compiling software and searching files. When run one at a time, Vera was often faster than Intel, AMD and Amazon chips, but not always by much. The gap widened when the server was packed with containers, because Vera kept finishing tasks at the same speed while rival chips hit a ceiling. Modal credits the chip's memory bandwidth and says the change will require work on its image build system. It did not say when Vera-powered sandboxes will reach customers. Nvidia unveiled Vera in March as a CPU built for agent workloads, and it has named Anthropic and OpenAI among early users. For founders running agents or reinforcement learning, host CPU throughput can decide how many sandboxes sit on each machine and how long GPUs wait on CPU work. Modal's numbers come from its own tests, so teams should run their own workloads before moving.