Nuvacore, the processor start-up founded by the founder of Nuvia, is reportedly raising $2.5 billion without a product

Six months after its launch, Gerard Williams’ start-up – backed by Sequoia – is reportedly seeking several hundred million to develop a data centre CPU designed for AI.

According to two sources cited by Reuters on October 9, Nuvacore, a San Jose start-up created six months ago and which still has no products, is in the process of raising several hundred million dollars based on a valuation of around $2.5 billion. The round is not complete and the amounts can still change. The company was founded by Gerard Williams, formerly of Apple who sold Nuvia to Qualcomm for $1.4 billion in 2021, along with John Bruno and Ram Srinivasan; Sequoia had conducted its seed round.

The CPU becomes strategic again

Nuvacore is targeting the central data center processor, a market held by Intel and AMD in x86 and nibbled away by Amazon and Microsoft's Arm chips. Its bet is unusual: to design the processor core before choosing the instruction set (x86, Arm or RISC-V), in order to optimize it for the dominant calculations in the AI infrastructure. Because CPUs orchestrate Nvidia's accelerators and run software agents, which has caused demand to jump.

The context is promising: according to Crunchbase, semiconductor start-ups raised $10.7 billion in the first five months of 2026, compared to $12.2 billion in the whole of 2025, and Nvidia says it expects $20 billion in sales of its Vera CPU in the current fiscal year.