Nuvacore, a six-month-old microchip startup that has yet to ship a product, is raising hundreds of millions of dollars at a roughly $2.5 billion valuation to develop a new central processor designed for data centers, according to two people familiar with the fundraising cited by Reuters.
The valuation figure had not been previously reported. The Information had earlier reported that Nuvacore was raising $200 million or more; the sources cautioned that the round has not closed and both the valuation and the size of the raise could change. Nuvacore declined to comment.
Betting on the CPU in an AI world
Nuvacore is betting that the humble central processor — long overshadowed by Nvidia's graphics chips — is due for a starring role in AI infrastructure. CPUs perform vital functions as traffic controllers for Nvidia's AI accelerators, and they increasingly run the autonomous AI software known as agents.
That dual role has made data-center CPUs a hot commodity as the appetite for data-crunching capacity to power chatbots such as Anthropic's Claude keeps swelling.
Design the core first, pick the architecture later
The startup's pitch is an unconventional one: its engineers will build the core functionality of the chip before committing to an instruction-set architecture — whether x86 as used by Intel and AMD, Arm, or RISC-V.
The strategy, described by the company last month, is meant to free designers from the limitations and requirements of any single architecture and optimize for the computations most common in data centers and AI infrastructure.
The team is designing a general-purpose CPU core it calls WarpCore, engineered for sustained, high-intensity workloads such as AI model training, inference and autonomous agent execution — with performance, power efficiency and silicon area optimized together.
It is pointedly not a TPU or a specialized inference accelerator; it is a CPU, but one the company says must be fundamentally rethought for the agentic era.
Nuvacore has been staffing up accordingly. David Williamson, a former Apple CPU engineering leader, has joined as senior vice president of hardware engineering, alongside new chiefs for marketing, operations and software.
A team with a track record
The founding team's pedigree is central to the pitch. Gerard Williams, a former Apple executive, co-founded Nuvia, which Qualcomm acquired in 2021 for $1.4 billion and later turned into the basis for its Oryon CPU cores.
Williams is joined by John Bruno and Ram Srinivasan, who also held senior engineering roles across Apple, Nuvia and Qualcomm. Sequoia Capital is backing the new venture.
The incumbents are formidable: Intel and AMD, with x86 technology, have long dominated the data-center CPU market, while Arm-based designs — found inside Amazon and Microsoft custom CPUs — have been making inroads.
For now, the biggest question is whether investors will pay $2.5 billion for a CPU company with no silicon yet — a price that buys belief in the team and the agentic-computing thesis, not a product.
By Hamza Faisal
