SpaceXAI Adopts NVIDIA's Vera CPU - First-Generation Starmind Satellite Planned on Vera Rubin NVL72
NVIDIA announced on August 24, 2026 that SpaceXAI will deploy Vera CPUs. Vera has 88 Olympus cores and up to 1.2TB/s of bandwidth, and NVIDIA calls it the first CPU built for AI agents. The first-generation Starmind AI satellite is planned on a Vera Rubin NVL72 base - all of it still at the plan stage.
NVIDIA announced on August 24, 2026 that SpaceXAI will deploy NVIDIA Vera CPUs1. Vera features 88 NVIDIA-designed Olympus cores, Spatial Multithreading technology, and high-bandwidth LPDDR5X memory delivering up to 1.2TB/s, and NVIDIA positions it as the first CPU built for AI agents1. The company claims it enables up to 1.8x faster task completion compared with x86 CPUs across workloads including agentic AI, reinforcement learning, and data processing1.
The stated use is the work that happens between model calls — orchestrating tools, executing code, processing data, and running simulations — with the argument that speeding this up keeps GPUs fed and fully utilized1. SpaceXAI president Mike Nicolls said Vera gives the company the CPU performance and memory bandwidth to run enormous amounts of orchestration, code, and data processing while keeping GPUs doing what they do best1.
The company plans to expand the AI infrastructure behind Grok on Vera Rubin, and to extend an optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 into space as the base for its first-generation “Starmind” AI satellite1. The release notes that orbit imposes dramatically different constraints from conventional data centers in power, thermal management, bandwidth, reliability, and physical integration1. No timing or scale for deployment or launch is given; at this point everything remains a plan.
Sources
- SpaceXAI Adopts NVIDIA Vera CPU to Accelerate Agentic AI at Massive Scale - NVIDIA official press release (August 24, 2026)
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