Sequoia-backed Nuvacore seeks $2.5B valuation with no product yet: Can ex-Apple pedigree win AI’s CPU race?

Nuvacore is trying to raise money at about a $2.5 billion valuation even though it has not shown a product. Reuters said the San Jose startup is looking for hundreds of millions of dollars, but the round isn’t closed and the size and price can still move. Sequoia backed its seed round in April, though the amount was never disclosed, and Reuters did not say whether this is the next step.

The pitch leans hard on the people in the room. Gerard Williams spent nearly a decade as Apple’s chief CPU architect before founding Nuvia in 2019 with John Bruno and Ram Srinivasan. Qualcomm later bought Nuvia for $1.4 billion in 2021, after the startup had raised close to $300 million. Williams then left Qualcomm, and Nuvacore has since added David Williamson, another former Apple CPU engineering leader, as senior vice president of hardware engineering.

That resume is doing most of the valuation work. Nuvia never announced a product, and neither has Nuvacore. But Nuvia’s design did become the basis of Qualcomm’s Oryon CPUs, which is the sort of proof investors love when there’s very little else to inspect. The company says it wants to “rewrite the rules of silicon” with a general-purpose CPU core built from the ground up.

The bigger bet is that AI data centres need far more than GPUs. Nvidia’s chips still do the heavy lifting, but CPUs handle traffic between them and run the software agents that automate tasks. Nuvacore says it will build much of a processor core before choosing an instruction set, a “Core First” approach for its WarpCore design. It has not said whether that means x86, Arm or RISC-V, though its job posts mention all three.

That delay cuts both ways. Reuters says the approach is meant to avoid locking into one architecture too early, but the choice still has to be made, and Arm rights could be awkward after Qualcomm’s legal fight with Arm. Meanwhile, other chip startups are already showing products or customers while asking for huge valuations. Nuvacore is asking investors to pay first and wait for the processor later.