These Apple Chip Experts Set Up Their Own Company - Qualcomm Just Bought It

Three star chip designers from Apple and Google formed a company called NUVIA in late 2019. They aimed to create silicon processing chips that'd eventually take on the likes of Intel and AMD, and raised a whole bunch of money in Series A and B funding and became a force to be reckoned with in a relatively short amount of time. Today, Qualcomm announced that they'll be acquiring NUVIA for $1.4 billion USD.

Co-founders of NUVIA include Gerard Williams III (CEO), Manu Gulati (SVP of Silicon Engineering), and John Bruno (SVP of System Engineering). Gerared Willams III spent 10 years at ARM then moved on to Apple, where he was Senior Director and Chief CPU Architect for nearly another decade.

Manu Gulati worked at AMD, 8x8, and Broadcom, and worked at Apple as lead SoC architect for 8 years, then went on to work at Google. Gulati was lead SoC Architect for consumer hardware at Google before co-founding NUVIA. John Bruno worked at ATI Technologies as ASIC team leader, at AMD as Chief Engineer for the Trinity Fusion APU, then moved on to Apple. At Apple, Bruno founded Apple's silicon competitive analysis team, then moved to Google as System Architect.

Now Qualcomm announced they'd be acquiring NUVIA for approximately $1.4 billion USD (before working capital and other adjustments). According to Qualcomm, "the of NUVIA CPUs to Qualcomm Technologies' already leading mobile graphics processing unit (GPU), AI engine, DSP and dedicated multimedia accelerators will further extend the leadership of Qualcomm Snapdragon platforms, and positions Snapdragon as the preferred platform for the future of connected computing."

Qualcomm suggests NUVIA CPUs will likely be integrated in a whole bunch of their products, including infrastructure networking solutions, laptops, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, digital cockpits, and in smartphones.

To be extra clear, this transaction includes NUVIA founders Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati, and John Bruno "and their employees" joining Qualcomm. In the press release for the acquisition, Qualcomm included voices of "strong support" from the following companies: Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Acer, ASUS, Bosch, Continental, General Motors, HMD, Honor, HP, Lenovo, LG Electronics, LG Mobile, OnePlus, OPPO, Panasonic, Renault, Sharp, Sony, VIVO, and Xiaomi.