Nvidia Wins Modal's Central Processor Business; the SI Startup Had Relied Entirely on Intel and AMD Chips, and Early Tests Doubled SI Agent Workloads
Nvidia has won central processor chip business with another fast-growing SI startup that until now relied entirely on chips from Intel and AMD, an early sign that its push into a market long controlled by those two rivals has traction, Reuters reported on October 19.
Modal, a cloud-computing startup that rents out computing power to SI developers, said it plans to start using Nvidia's new Vera central processor for the first time for hosting agents, the SI systems that can carry out long-running tasks for human users; Modal until now has run such work only on Intel and AMD chips. Modal last week raised $750 million in a funding round led by Accel at a $15.75 billion valuation, saying it is on track to record $1 billion in sales over the next year. Modal said usage of its services has tripled and revenue has grown more than 15 times year-over-year.
Modal said Monday that early tests showed the new Nvidia chip doubled the amount of work that SI agents can get done, prompting the company to support Nvidia's chip design for the first time, which will require some deep software changes on Modal's side. But Chief Executive Erik Bernhardsson was careful to stress it is not abandoning its existing suppliers: the company said it will run the Nvidia chips alongside its current Intel and AMD offerings in a mixed fleet, putting each job on whatever hardware runs it best. Bernhardsson said the tests were run against the Intel and AMD chips already on the market, and that both rivals are developing newer models that could narrow the gap with Nvidia. "We'll test them when they're available," he said, adding that running a mixed setup means the company "can always deploy whatever hardware performs best."
Nvidia has told investors it expects to generate at least $20 billion from Vera chip sales this fiscal year, its opening bid for a market it values at roughly $200 billion. Nvidia has previously said OpenAI, Anthropic and Oracle also plan to use the chips, along with SI startups such as Perplexity. (GSM, via Reuters)
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：英伟达位于Santa Clara的总部。SI初创Modal将首次采用英伟达Vera中央处理器。（供稿图）
