Modal Plans NVIDIA Vera Rollout for Sandboxes in First Arm Move

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Modal said in a company blog post on October 19, 2026 that it plans to roll out support for NVIDIA’s Arm-based Vera CPU to power Modal Sandboxes, the company’s first departure from an all-x86 fleet, after benchmark results it published showed up to double the task throughput of an equivalent x86 machine under load.

NVIDIA hand-delivered Modal’s first Vera CPU server to the company’s San Francisco office in the week before the announcement, Modal said. Vera is NVIDIA’s Arm-compatible processor, built for the Vera Rubin GPU platform but also available as a standalone CPU server. Bringing Arm into the fleet would require changes across Modal’s infrastructure and image build system, which the company described as a huge change after a long history of running exclusively x86 machines.

Orchestrating a Sandbox product means running hundreds of concurrent containers and virtual machines on each cloud host, and Modal said the resulting multi-tenant clusters are noisy. Resource usage can be extremely spiky: a sandbox may sit mostly idle while waiting on a language model and then see CPU usage surge 10x above baseline because of an npm install or an expensive grep command.

The shape of each workload is only known at runtime, so resource sizing is often a guess, and heterogeneous tenants packed into a single pool of compute create noisy-neighbor problems, where one customer’s behavior degrades another’s performance.

Rather than require fixed reservations sized to maximum usage, Modal Sandboxes support bursting, which lets users reserve guaranteed capacity for their P50 usage and trust that padding inside the host node will absorb transient spikes. Modal said the approach has saved users millions of dollars, but acknowledged that it raises exposure to the noisy-neighbor effects that strict limits would otherwise avoid.

Modal identified two prevalent Sandbox use cases: background agents, citing Ramp Inspect and agents running on Niteshift, and reinforcement-learning rollouts.