Inverters play a central role in modern society including renewable energy integration and motor drives. Due to the inherent switched nature of the inverter waveforms harmonic distortion is an issue. Additionally, the switching patterns are perturbed by unavoidable switching delays. Amongst those, nonlinear and load-dependent switching delays (known as inverter 'dead-time delays') are the most difficult to compensate. In this paper, we propose a new approach to delay compensation and harmonic suppression in inverter voltage. The proposed approach is based on variable prediction horizon nonlinear model predictive control.