- Sequoia-backed Nuvacore is reportedly raising at a $2.5B valuation with no product yet.
- The round has not closed, and Reuters’ sources say its size and price could change.
- Nvidia says it has visibility to nearly $20B in CPU revenue this year.
Nuvia, the chip startup Gerard Williams sold to Qualcomm for $1.4 billion in 2021, never announced a product. His second company, Nuvacore, does not have one either, and it is reportedly raising money at a valuation of about $2.5 billion.
The San Jose, California-based startup is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the fundraising. Reuters described the company as six months old.
Sequoia Capital led a seed round that Nuvacore announced in April without disclosing the amount. Bloomberg reported at the time that the company expected to raise a Series A within a few months. Reuters did not say whether this is that round.
The pitch rests on a shift inside AI data centres. Nvidia’s graphics processors do the heavy maths, but central processing units (CPUs) direct traffic between those chips and run the software agents that automate tasks, according to Reuters.
A team that has built this before
Williams spent nearly a decade as Apple’s chief CPU architect before founding Nuvia in 2019 with John Bruno and Ram Srinivasan. Nuvia raised close to $300 million before Qualcomm bought it, and Williams joined Qualcomm as a senior vice president of engineering. He later announced his exit in a social media post, saying his next chapter would start with painting his house and clearing a long to-do list.
Ram Srinivasan, a system-on-chip architecture specialist whose résumé spans Apple, Intel, Nuvia, and Qualcomm, completes the Nuvacore trio. The company has since hired David Williamson, a former Apple CPU engineering leader, as senior vice president of hardware engineering. It has promised to “rewrite the rules of silicon” with a general-purpose CPU core built from the ground up.
With no product to show, the team’s record is what the valuation rests on. That record is real: Nuvia’s design became the basis of Qualcomm’s Oryon CPUs.
Why AI needs more CPUs
Nuvacore says it will build much of a processor core before choosing an instruction set, the rulebook that decides which software a chip can run. It calls the approach Core First and the first design WarpCore, which it described in a September 29 post on X, according to Notebookcheck.
The options are x86, which Intel and AMD use; Arm, which powers many mobile processors and Nvidia’s Vera; and the open RISC-V standard. Nuvacore has not said which it will pick, though its job postings reference all three.
Reuters reported that the approach lets engineers avoid the limits of a specific architecture and tune a design for the computations most common in data centres. Delaying the decision does not remove it.
Notebookcheck noted that an Arm version would need Arm’s architecture rights, which could be hard to secure given Arm’s past legal dispute with Qualcomm and Nuvia, while RISC-V needs no such licence. Xenospectrum added that Nuvacore has published no measured figures for WarpCore and that a late choice does not let engineers skip conformance checks.
The new AI chip race
Investors have funded chip startups at every layer. Semiconductor startups raised about $10.7 billion across seed to pre-IPO rounds in the first five months of 2026, according to Crunchbase, which said funding was on track to eclipse last year’s levels.
Cerebras went public in May, and Nvidia agreed in December 2025 to buy assets of Groq in a deal reportedly valued at $20 billion. Reuters pointed out that venture firms in Silicon Valley spent the past decade favouring software over hardware, which takes longer to build, costs more, and sells in cycles. Nuvacore joins a group of young chip startups seeking billion-dollar valuations before releasing a product.
Etched, which builds inference systems rather than CPUs, shows how fast that appetite moved. It raised about $500 million at a $5 billion valuation in a round reported in January, then $300 million at $10.3 billion in July, and $700 million at $21 billion in August, led by Jane Street, which became its first customer.
Efficient Computer, a Carnegie Mellon spinout in Pittsburgh, is the nearest comparison on general-purpose compute. It raised more than $97 million at a $650 million valuation on September 29, led by TQ Ventures. Its Electron E1 chip is shipping in volume for drones and small robots, with data centre parts as the stated next step, Reuters reported.
In Europe, Eindhoven-based Euclyd raised more than 200 million euros (about $231 million) in a Series A on September 15, co-led by Samsung, Somerset Capital Partners, EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund, and Innovation Industries. UK chip startup Fractile was also reported in August to be in advanced talks on a raise at a $6.5 billion pre-money valuation.
Etched’s valuation climbed after it showed a working chip and a paying customer. Nuvacore is asking investors to price the CPU first. The first benchmark will show whether that order of events works for a processor.
