Qualcomm announced an agreement to acquire chip design start-up Nuvia for USD 1.4 billion. Based in California, Nuvia is developing ARM-based CPUs for data centre applications, promising a more low-power, high-performance product than the dominant chips in the market. The acquisition signals a new step in Qualcomm's efforts to expand beyond the mobile phone market and challenge Intel's lead in the semiconductor market.
Qualcomm said 5G is accelerating the convergence of mobility and computing. The acquisition of Nuvia will build on its Snapdragon processors to deliver improvements in CPU performance and power efficiency and meet the demands of next-generation computing devices with 5G connectivity, the company said. It plans to integrate Nuvia CPUs in to a broad portfolio of products, powering flagship smartphones, next-generation laptops, vehicle systems, extended reality devices and infrastructure networking equipment.
Nuvia has announced two public funding rounds to date, of USD 53 million in November 2019 and USD 240 million in September 2020, attracting top investors such as Blackrock, Fidelity, Temasek, Dell and the founder of Marvell Technology. The company's first-generation Phoenix CPU and Orion SoC were developed from the ground up to address the challenges in achieving increasing performance at lower power for server CPUs used in intensive data centre applications. The company uses an ARM-based platform to address the power constraints in a similar way to how smartphones were developed.
Nuvia founders Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati and John Bruno and their employees will join Qualcomm once the takeover is completed. Prior to starting Nuvia in early 2019, the three founders held various engineering lead roles at Google, Apple, ARM, Broadcom and AMD.
