Exclusive-Sequoia-backed chip startup Nuvacore raising funds at about a $2.5 billion valuation, sources say. By Max A. Cherney and Krystal Hu SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Six-month-old microchip startup Nuvacore, which does not yet have 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 By Max A. Cherney and Krystal Hu SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Six-month-old microchip startup Nuvacore, which does not yet have 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. 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. CPUs perform vital functions as traffic controllers for Nvidia's AI chips and run autonomous AI software known as agents. The roughly $2.5 billion valuation has not been previously reported. The Information reported previously that Nuvacore was raising $200 million or more. The funding round has not closed, and the people cautioned that the valuation and size of the capital raise could change. Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, which use x86 technology, have long dominated the data center CPU market. Companies designing chips based on Arm's technology - found inside Amazon and Microsoft custom CPUs - have also attempted to make inroads in the data center market. Nuvacore has not yet developed a product. Last month, it described an unconventional design strategy: to build the core functionality of the chip before committing to an architecture such as the x86 used by Intel and AMD, or Arm, which is used in most mobile phones. The design strategy will allow the company's engineers to avoid the limitations and requirements of specific architectures and optimize a design for the type of computations that are most common in data centers and AI infrastructure, Nuvacore said. Nuvacore declined to comment. The San Jose, California-based startup was founded by renowned engineers Gerard Williams, John Bruno and Ram Srinivasan. Williams, a former Apple executive, sold a prior startup called Nuvia to Qualcomm for $1.4 billion in 2021. Nuvacore earlier this year announced a seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital. It joins a series of young chip startups that have sought billion-dollar valuations before releasing a product as investor appetite for AI hardware companies has returned. Over the past decade, Silicon Valley venture capital firms have taken much less interest in hardware than software because of hardware's longer development cycles, higher capital needs and the industry's cyclical demand. Investors put about $10.7 billion into semiconductor startups in the first five months of 2026, already outpacing the $12.2 billion raised globally in all of 2025, according to Crunchbase data. Earlier this year, Intel said it could not manufacture enough chips to meet demand, and was able to sell products it had previously determined were too faulty for sale. AMD also described swelling CPU sales in a recent results conference call with analysts. Shares in both companies have risen more than 180% this year. Nvidia launched a CPU called Vera this year. CEO Jensen Huang has said the company expects to sell $20 billion worth of its Vera CPU in this fiscal year, which ends in January. (Reporting by Max A. Cherney and Krystal Hu in San Francisco; editing by Peter Henderson and David Gaffen)

Nuvacore's WarpCore ditches the isa-first playbook, building CPU silicon before deciding on x86, Arm, or RISC-V. Nuvacore's WarpCore is a new type of CPU core that drops the traditional chip-building strategy to focus on the Core IP first. Nuvacore's WarpCore starts with the CPU silicon first before picking up an ISA. Traditional CPU architectures are designed with the particular ISA they are going to use in mind. The most adopted ISAs today are x86, Arm, and RISC-V. But the folks at Nuvacore, who have the experience of building various chips for Apple, Qualcomm, AMD, Intel and more. Nuvacore is all-in on developing a next-generation CPU with this team, and the company is sharing the first info on how it plans to do so. Nuvacore's recent hiring spree includes David Williamson as SVP of Hardware Engineering (known for his work on Apple Silicon), Jon Carvill as SVP of Marketing and Communications (known for his work at Metal, Intel, Qualcomm, Global Foundries, AMD, and Nuvia), Sara Feulner as SVP of Operations (known for her work at Acutane), and Anthony Scarpino as SVP of Software (known for his work at Qualcomm for advancing the custom CPU technology). Meet WarpCore; this is the name of the new CPU core that is being developed by Nuvacore. The chip will be designed as a CPU, and unlike traditional designs, the WarpCore focuses on a "Core First" approach. What "Core First" essentially means is to develop and build a significant portion of the CPU IP before locking in an instruction set. With this approach, Nuvacore claims to give its team the flexibility and freedom to build the best possible core architecture without any ISA lock-ins. It looks like this freedom will help Nuvacore address three key areas that they believe are widely constrained in current chip-building workflows: Performance, Efficiency, Scalability. In terms of performance, Nuvacore's WarpCore is said to be engineered to sustain "top-tier performance" across today's demanding workloads in platforms such as hyperscale data centers and AI infrastructure. For power efficiency, the company will focus on scaling the architecture in terms of perf/watt by reducing power consumption and maximizing performance per watt and performance per millimeter of silicon. * Clean-sheet, general-purpose CPU architecture built from the core up * Core First design philosophy focused on maximizing architectural headroom * Optimized initially for the demands of modern data-center infrastructure * Engineered for sustained performance under continuous, high-intensity workloads * Performance, power efficiency, and silicon area optimized together * Built by a proven team with deep expertise across CPU architecture, silicon, systems, and software Now a little bit on the WarpCore itself. While the company isn't sharing any details right now, they do claim that the WarpCore is a clean-sheet, general-purpose CPU architecture built from the core up. The architecture will initially be designed and optimized for modern data centers and AI applications, and is backed by Sequoia. Considering this, if WarpCore does end up as a success in the AI segment, it is possible that the company will try to roll out variations of it to various other segments. There are definitely a lot of unknowns in this announcement, but a Core First philosophy is definitely going to be a thing to look forward to. Now the question is how long till Wccf Tech Inc get to see a working chip in action based on the WarpCore architecture. About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking. Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of its news coverage in your feeds.