Nuvacore is six months old, has no product, and is already being talked about at a $2.5 billion valuation. The San Jose chip startup is raising hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh funding. It wants to build a central processor for data centres, according to two people familiar with the talks.
The round has not closed, and the people cautioned that both the valuation and the size of the raise could still change. The $2.5 billion figure has not been reported before. The Information had said earlier that Nuvacore was raising $200 million or more.
What Nuvacore is building
Nuvacore is designing a CPU for data centres. These are the chips that act as traffic controllers for Nvidia’s AI accelerators, and they also run the autonomous AI software known as agents.
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Demand for that work has swollen as chatbots such as Anthropic’s Claude scale up. The company has not built a product yet. Last month it described an unusual design strategy. Build the core functionality of the chip first, and only then commit to an architecture such as x86 or Arm.
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Nuvacore says that approach lets its engineers sidestep the limits of a specific architecture. It also lets them tune the design for the computations data centres run most often. The company declined to comment on the fundraising.
The team behind it
Nuvacore was founded by three well-known engineers: Gerard Williams, John Bruno and Ram Srinivasan. Williams is a former Apple executive. He sold his previous startup, Nuvia, to Qualcomm for $1.4 billion in 2021.
Sequoia Capital led a seed round for the company earlier this year. Nuvacore is one of several young chip firms that have chased billion-dollar valuations before shipping a product.
A market Intel and AMD still own
Intel and AMD, which use x86 technology, have long dominated the data centre CPU market. Chips built on Arm’s designs, including custom processors from Amazon and Microsoft, have been trying to break in.
Nvidia entered the fray this year with a CPU called Vera. Chief executive Jensen Huang has said the company expects to sell $20 billion worth of Vera chips in the fiscal year ending January.
Why the money is flowing back to chips
Investors put about $10.7 billion into semiconductor startups in the first five months of 2026, according to Crunchbase. That already tops the $12.2 billion raised globally through all of 2025.
Intel has said it could not make enough chips to meet demand. AMD reported swelling CPU sales on a recent call with analysts. Shares of both companies have risen more than 180 per cent this year, which tells you how quickly the mood around hardware has turned.