At the Design Automation Conference in Long Beach in late July, Nvidia revealed that it is now using its own Vera CPUs to design its next generation of chips — a self-referential loop that compresses the long, painstaking arc of semiconductor development. By demonstrating 1.5x performance gains in the industry's most demanding verification and simulation tools, and by weaving AI agents capable of autonomous physics-based reasoning into the design process itself, Nvidia is proposing a new relationship between human engineers and the machines they build. The deeper implication is not merely spee