Nuvacore, a San Jose based chip startup that is only about six months old and has not shipped a product, is raising hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh funding at a valuation of about USD 2.5 billion, two people familiar with the talks told Reuters. The report, published as an exclusive, said the round has not closed and that both the size of the raise and the valuation could still change.
The company declined to comment on the fundraising. The Information had earlier reported that Nuvacore was raising USD 200 million or more, and Reuters said the USD 2.5 billion figure had not been reported before. Nuvacore is designing a central processing unit, or CPU, for data centres. These chips route work to Nvidia’s AI accelerators and also run the software behind AI agents, and demand for that work has grown as large models such as Anthropic’s Claude scale up.
What Nuvacore is building
Nuvacore is working on a general purpose CPU core designed from scratch for data centres and AI infrastructure, with an emphasis on performance and area efficiency. The company says the core is meant to sustain long running, compute intensive workloads, including always on systems such as AI agents. It has not built a product yet.
The Core First design strategy
Last month the company described an unusual approach it calls Core First. Instead of choosing an instruction set architecture such as x86 or Arm at the start, Nuvacore is building the core of the chip first and only then committing to an architecture. The company says this lets its engineers sidestep the limits of a specific instruction set and tune the design for the computations data centres run most often. Tom’s Hardware reported that the approach moves a large part of the foundational CPU work away from a predetermined architecture.
Who is investing, and what the round looks like
Sequoia Capital led a seed round for Nuvacore earlier this year, and it is the startup’s known backer so far. If the new round closes at the reported level, Nuvacore would join a small group of young chip firms that reached a billion dollar valuation before shipping a product. Nuvacore has not named the new investors, and the structure of the round has not been confirmed.
Read more: Sequoia-backed AI startup Mecka AI raised USD 60 million in a Series B round to train robots, another sign of how quickly capital is moving into AI compute and robotics.
The founders behind Nuvacore
Nuvacore was founded by three engineers from the high performance chip world. Gerard Williams is a former Apple executive who led elements of the company’s Arm based processor designs and later founded Nuvia, which Qualcomm acquired for USD 1.4 billion in 2021. He is joined by John Bruno, who worked on system architecture, and Ram Srinivasan, a specialist in system on chip design. The three worked together at Apple and at Nuvia before a spell at Qualcomm.
The market and the numbers
Intel and AMD, which both 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 category this year with a CPU called Vera, and chief executive Jensen Huang has said the company expects to sell USD 20 billion worth of Vera chips in the fiscal year ending January.
Investors put about USD 10.7 billion into semiconductor startups in the first five months of 2026, according to Crunchbase, already more than the USD 12.2 billion raised globally through all of 2025. Intel has said it could not make enough chips to meet demand, and AMD has reported rising CPU sales. Shares in both companies have climbed more than 180 per cent this year.
What happens next
Nuvacore has not confirmed the round, and the sources cautioned that the terms could shift before a deal is signed. For now it remains a design stage company with an experienced founding team, backing from Sequoia, and a plan to take on a market that two entrenched players still control.
