Modal said it plans to add Nvidia’s Vera CPU to its Sandbox service after internal tests showed higher throughput under heavy load, potentially allowing more jobs to share a server.
The company reported up to twice the task throughput of a comparable Intel Granite Rapids server when many jobs ran at once. Modal said individual tasks took about the same time or sometimes less time on Vera. Its advantage was smaller and inconsistent when tasks ran one at a time on an unloaded machine.
The test used 50 Terminal-Bench oracle solutions and verifiers in prewarmed, concurrent Docker containers, with network calls removed. It measured CPU-side work rather than complete live AI agent sessions. The results are Modal’s internal benchmark findings, not measured gains from customer deployments.
Modal’s Sandbox service runs isolated workloads, including code written by AI agents. The company said its hosts can run hundreds of containers and virtual machines at once, making CPU contention a concern when workloads spike. Modal says greater throughput could let it fit more jobs on each host without lengthening task times. It also says GPUs used in reinforcement learning can sit idle while CPU tasks finish; any reduction in that idle time remains a projected benefit.
Reuters reported that Modal plans to keep Intel and AMD processors in service alongside Vera. In that report, Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson said the company would choose hardware according to which option performs best for a job.
Adding Vera would also require engineering work. Modal has historically used x86 machines, and it said running Arm-based servers would require changes to its infrastructure and the process it uses to build software images.
Modal said on Oct. 14 that its annualized run rate had topped $1 billion, while an Accel-led funding round had brought in $750 million. The financing valued the company at $15.75 billion after the investment.
In March, Nvidia said Vera was in full production and projected availability through partners in the second half of 2026. Modal said it has received its first Vera server and plans to work with Nvidia and cloud providers to expand its fleet. It has not announced when customers can use Vera-powered Sandboxes.
