Sequoia-backed chip startup Nuvacore raises at $2.5 billion valuation

Nuvacore, a six-month-old San Francisco microchip startup with no product yet, is raising hundreds of millions of dollars at a roughly $2.5 billion valuation to develop a new central processor for data centers, according to two people familiar with the fundraising, per Reuters. The round has not closed and the valuation and size could change; The Information had previously reported Nuvacore was raising $200 million or more.

The startup was founded by Gerard Williams III, John Bruno and Ram Srinivasan, the former Nuvia team Qualcomm acquired in 2021, and has described an unconventional “Core First” design strategy: build the core functionality of the chip before committing to an architecture such as x86 or Arm. CPUs matter because they act as traffic controllers for Nvidia’s AI chips and run autonomous AI agents, and appetite for central processors has swelled with demand for data-crunching capacity.