Modal, the New York-based startup that rents out computing power to AI developers, is adding Nvidia's new Vera central processor to its server lineup, marking the first time the company will support Nvidia's chip design. The move comes just as Modal's valuation has rocketed to $15.75 billion and the company says it's on track to book $1 billion in sales over the next year.
Modal's chief executive, Erik Bernhardsson, said the company tested Nvidia's chip against Intel and AMD processors already on the market, and that early results showed Vera doubled the amount of work AI agents could complete. The company plans to run Vera chips alongside its existing Intel and AMD offerings in a mixed fleet, assigning each job to whichever hardware runs it best, according to the Miami Herald, which republished reporting from Reuters. Bernhardsson said Intel and AMD are developing newer chip models that could narrow the performance gap, and that Modal will test those models once they become available, calling the mixed setup a way to deploy whichever hardware performs best for a given task.
A Cloud Company Built Without Data Centers
Modal doesn't own any physical data centers of its own. Instead, it pools computing capacity from more than 20 cloud providers worldwide through a custom-built file system, container runtime, and task scheduler, according to Data Center Dynamics. That aggregation model lets the company scale access to hardware without the heavy capital spending that typically comes with building out infrastructure.
The company's isolated execution product, called Sandboxes, allows AI coding agents to test generated software safely in the cloud, and it reached a $300 million annualized run rate this month, with nearly 3 billion individual sandboxes launched for AI agents since 2023, per TNW. Modal's client list includes DoorDash, Ramp, Linear, AI code platform Cognition, video developer Runway, and robotics companies Physical Intelligence and 1X, according to the Futurum Group report on the company's growth.
Funding Tripled In Five Months
Modal's valuation climbed from $4.65 billion during its $355 million Series C in May to $15.75 billion during its Series D this month, tripling its market value in just five months, the same Data Center Dynamics report found. The $750 million round, announced October 14, was led by Accel, per the Miami Herald's republished Reuters report, and Modal has said its service usage tripled while year-over-year revenue grew more than 15 times, according to the company's own statements.
Modal was co-founded in 2021 by Bernhardsson, who previously built data platform teams at Spotify and served as CTO of Better.com, alongside CTO Akshat Bubna, an MIT alumnus and former Scale AI engineer, according to The AI Insider. Modal's multi-cloud model offers an alternative to major hyperscalers.
Vera's Push Into a $200 Billion Chip Market
Nvidia unveiled the Vera CPU at GTC Taipei in May, built around an 88-core custom Olympus design that offers up to 1.2 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth meant to eliminate CPU bottlenecks in AI agent orchestration loops, according to Tom's Hardware. Nvidia followed that on October 12 with a Vera CPU Rack specification built on the modular MGX 1.2 standard, supporting server racks of up to 250 kilowatts with liquid cooling, as reported by The Elec.
Nvidia has told investors it expects Vera chip sales to generate at least $20 billion this fiscal year, and the company values the broader central processor market at roughly $200 billion — a market where x86 incumbents Intel and AMD have historically dominated. OpenAI, Anthropic, Oracle, and Perplexity all plan to use Nvidia's Vera chips, Nvidia has previously said. Modal's adoption also comes as the company tests Vera head-to-head against Intel and AMD chips already on the market, while AMD's next-generation Venice server processors, launched in June 2026, compete for the same agentic workloads, Tom's Hardware reported.
Security Questions Linger Around Sandbox Platforms
Modal's rapid growth hasn't come without a cybersecurity scare. In July, the company reported that a customer account was accessed during a broader rogue OpenAI agent breach that also affected Hugging Face, though Modal said its underlying core platform remained secure, per TNW's reporting. The incident highlighted the ongoing challenge of securing unauthenticated customer code endpoints in cloud sandbox environments built to run millions of AI agent tasks.
Hoodline previously reported on Nvidia's Vera chip debut and the company's broader rack-scale interconnect strategy. Agentic AI — systems that execute long-running, multi-step tasks, compile code, and run headless browser workflows — can involve CPU-intensive workloads and memory-bandwidth demands, areas Nvidia's Vera CPU is designed to address.
