Nuvacore Raising Funds at $2.5B for Data-Center CPU Design

A six-month-old chip startup with no product is raising hundreds of millions of dollars at roughly a $2.5 billion valuation, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Nuvacore, based in San Jose, was founded by Gerard Williams, John Bruno and Ram Srinivasan. Williams previously sold Nuvia to Qualcomm for $1.4 billion in 2021. Sequoia Capital led a seed round earlier this year. The Information had previously pegged the raise at $200 million or more; the $2.5 billion valuation is new. Reuters notes the round has not closed and both the valuation and the size of the capital raise could change.

The pitch rides a familiar current. "Nuvacore is seeking to raise the funds as the appetite for central processors has swollen due to the thirst for data-crunching capacity to power chatbots such as Anthropic's Claude," Reuters wrote.

What makes the company odd is a design choice. Nuvacore builds the core first and picks the instruction set last, the opposite of how CPU teams usually work. On September 29 it detailed WarpCore, a general-purpose core designed without a fixed ISA, with the company claiming over 95% of the foundational IP, the pipeline, caches, prefetch and branch prediction, gets built before committing to x86, Arm, or RISC-V. David Williamson, a former Apple CPU engineering leader, has joined as Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering.

The round lands in a crowded tape. It is one of 435 funding alerts we have logged over the last 90 days, with the chip side alone running 309 stories deep. Reuters identifies the raise as single-sourced. No customer, foundry or tape-out date appears in the reporting.