The XA P2N-E2 puts the CPU, not the GPU, at the center of an ASUS AI server: a 2U NVIDIA MGX machine with two Vera processors, pitched at the part of agentic AI that runs code instead of generating text.
ASUS introduced the XA P2N-E2 at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose. In its release, the company says the target is the execution layer around a model: code execution, tool use, sandboxing, data processing and orchestration. The server accepts up to two dual-slot NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, so graphics hardware is an add-on here. ASUS says the chip's single-thread speed and energy-efficient, high-bandwidth memory are meant to keep agents responsive during execution and evaluation work.
The XA P2N-E2 product page fills in the hardware. Each Vera processor has 88 cores and 176 threads. Sixteen SOCAMM2 modules of LPDDR5X-9600 memory reach 1.5 TB, and ASUS claims up to twice the energy efficiency of conventional RDIMM. The two CPUs link over second-generation NVLink-C2C at up to 1.8 TB/s. Storage is eight hot-swap E1.S drives, with PCIe Gen6 slots for network cards and a DPU. The chassis is fully air-cooled, and the CPU and GPU trays can be serviced independently.
Why build a server around the CPU? Reinforcement learning and agent evaluation tend to run many sandboxed environments at once, and each one needs processor time between model calls. A dense pool of fast cores can matter as much as accelerator count for that work. That reading is ours, not an ASUS benchmark: the company published no performance figures, price or ship date for the server.
The XA P2N-E2 was one of several systems on ASUS's stand. At rack scale, ASUS lists the XA VR721-E3 AI POD, which combines 36 Vera CPUs with 72 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs on the Vera Rubin NVL72 platform with full liquid cooling. The XR R1I12B-M1BHFS pairs NVIDIA HGX Rubin NVL8 with Intel Xeon chips, and the AMD side includes the XA AM3A-E13, an air-cooled 10U chassis holding eight Instinct MI355X accelerators. All of it is on show at ASUS Booth #B9 during the summit.
