Qualcomm said Wednesday that it plans to buy startup Nuvia for $1.4 billion, potentially as a way to beef up its own CPU efforts and challenge Apple more directly in the Arm computing space.
Nuvia was founded by an ex-Apple chip architect, Gerard Williams III, who was reportedly pushed into designing server chips because of a non-compete clause that he had signed with his former employer. Nuvia’s mission is, in its words, to “reimagine silicon design to create a new class of processor that delivers the step-function performance and energy efficiency improvements needed to power the next era of computing.� Nuvia has never announced a product, though it was suspected to be developing its own Arm CPU for data centers.