Nuvacore reportedly seeks at least $200M at roughly $2.5B valuation

Nuvacore is seeking at least $200 million at a roughly $2.5 billion valuation while it develops a general-purpose processor for data centers, Reuters reported Friday. Citing two people familiar with the talks, Reuters said the round remains open and separately relayed an earlier report from The Information that put the fundraising target at $200 million or more. The six-month-old startup has not yet released a product.

The processor Nuvacore wants to build is a CPU, the general-purpose chip that coordinates work across a server. In AI systems, CPUs manage tasks around specialized accelerators such as Nvidia GPUs, and they can also run agent software. Nuvacore says its design is aimed at the sustained workloads of data centers, advanced AI systems and agents.

Its technical approach starts with the CPU core before choosing an instruction-set architecture. The company has not committed to x86, used by Intel and AMD, or Arm. Nuvacore says delaying that choice lets its engineers optimize more of the design around common data-center and AI computations. It has disclosed no finished processor.

Gerard Williams, John Bruno and Ram Srinivasan founded the San Jose company, which announced a Sequoia-led seed round earlier this year without disclosing its size. Williams previously founded Nuvia, another CPU startup, and sold it to Qualcomm for $1.4 billion in 2021. The founders bring prior chip-design experience, but Nuvacore’s current proposition still rests on engineering plans rather than a shipping product.

The proposed round has not closed, and Reuters’ sources cautioned that both its size and valuation could change. Nuvacore declined to comment on the fundraising.