NVIDIA pitches its Vera CPU to China to skirt US export controls

With its AI GPU sales to China still frozen, NVIDIA opened orders for its 88-core Arm-based Vera CPU to Chinese cloud customers, with deliveries as early as August — and Alibaba and ByteDance already on board. The Vera is the CPU half of NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform; a single chip runs north of $20,000, and a full 256-chip rack about $10 million. The move exploits a gap in US rules, which haven’t restricted advanced CPUs the way they have AI GPUs.