Qualcomm Acquires CPU Startup Owned by Former Apple Exec for $1.4 Billion

Silicon design firm Nuvia, which was founded back in 2019 by former Apple silicon executive Gerard Williams III, along with Manu Gulati and John Bruno, has been acquired by Qualcomm is a $1.4 billion deal, Android Authority is reporting.

Williams, who was the chief architect behind several major Apple CPUs and chipsets from 2010 to 2019, also worked at Arm from 1998 to 2010, working on CPU tech like the Arm Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A15 CPU cores.

While announcing the acquisition, Qualcomm said that Nuvia has industry-leading expertise in “high performance processors, Systems on a Chip and power management for compute-intensive devices and applications.”

“Nuvia CPUs are expected to be integrated across Qualcomm Technologies’ broad portfolio of products, powering flagship smartphones, next-generation laptops, and digital cockpits, as well as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, extended reality and infrastructure networking solutions,” Qualcomm explained.

Qualcomm also said that Nuvia CPUs will soon be found inside next-generation laptops, hinting that a possible Apple M1-competitor for Arm-based Windows notebooks could be coming in the near future.