By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO, July 7 (Reuters) - AI startup Perplexity on Tuesday confirmed it plans to use Nvidia's NVDA.O new central processing units, as the chip giant works to broaden its market and take on entrenched players such as Intel INTC.O and Advanced Micro Devices AMD.O.

Nvidia has said it expects to generate $20 billion in sales from its "Vera" CPU, a more generic computing chip than its AI-specific offerings, by the end of this fiscal year. The Vera chips are part of Nvidia's efforts to diversify sales as artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI and DeepSeek make their own AI chips.

Nvidia is entering a crowded market for CPUs long dominated by Intel and AMD, who supply CPUs for everything from laptops to web servers. But many of those chips were designed before the rise of what are known as AI "agents" that can carry out complex tasks on their own after receiving instructions from their human users.

Unlike human users of CPUs, who take breaks between tasks, AI agents do not. Perplexity Vice President for Computer Enterprise and Infrastructure Nate Kupp said Nvidia's CPU carried out AI agent coding tasks about 1.5 times faster than traditional CPUs.

"Vera really stood out to us as just like a dead-on fit for a lot of the core workloads that we have," Kupp said in an interview.

Perplexity declined to disclose how many Nvidia CPUs it plans to buy. Nvidia has previously disclosed that OpenAI, Anthropic and Oracle plan to use its CPUs.