Former Apple chip executives to take on Intel, AMD

Three of Apple Inc’s former top semiconductor executives in charge of iPhone chips have founded a startup to design processors for data centers, aiming to take on current industry leaders Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. NUVIA Inc was founded by Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati and John Bruno in early 2019 and is developing a processor code-named Phoenix.

The company on Friday said it raised $53 million from Dell Technologies Capital and several Silicon Valley firms, which will help it expand from 60 employees to about 100 by the end of this year. The company’s founders, backers and plans have not been previously reported.

Williams left Apple this spring after more than nine years as chief architect for all Apple central processors and systems-on-a-chip. Gulati spent eight years at Apple working on mobile systems-on-a-chip, and Bruno spent five years in Apple’s platform architecture group.

Gulati and Bruno also worked for Alphabet Inc’s Google before coming to NUVIA. At NUVIA, the group’s goal is to take the lessons learned designing powerful chips for small, battery-powered devices such as iPhones and apply them to large, electricity hungry data center servers.