Qualcomm announced today that it has completed the acquisition of Nuvia, a startup founded in 2019 by three former engineers on Apple’s silicon team. The deal is worth $ 1.4 billion and will strengthen Qualcomm’s efforts to compete with Apple Silicon and create custom CPUs.
Nuvia went out of “stealth” mode in 2019 with a powerful team of three former Apple engineers. Gerard Williams spent a decade at Apple, Manu Gulati spent eight years working on iPhone chips and John Bruno five years.
Nuvia’s CEO, Gerard Williams, seen in the main image, will become Qualcomm’s senior vice president of engineering through this acquisition. Williams previously served as Apple’s chief chip architect, leading the development of A-series processors within the iPhone and iPad.
The story gets even more complicated. Williams left Apple in March 2019 and, shortly after, was sued by Apple. The Apple lawsuit alleges that Williams exploited Apple technology and called on other Apple employees to join him at Nuvia.
Williams countered Apple’s accusations and said that the alleged “breach of contract” complaint is not enforceable and that Apple has illegally monitored his text messages. There has been no resolution in this process so far.
In a Qualcomm press release today, Williams said that the Nuvia team will join Qualcomm to “create a new class of high-performance computing platforms that will set industry standards”. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon added that the team will improve Qualcomm’s CPU roadmap:
“The world-class NUVIA team enhances our CPU roadmap, extending Qualcomm’s leadership position in technology with the Windows, Android and Chrome ecosystems,” said Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm Incorporated president and CEO. “The broad support of this acquisition from all sectors validates the opportunity we have to provide differentiated products with leading CPU performance and energy efficiency, as computing on demand increases in the 5G era.”
As seen by ArsTechnica, Qualcomm’s press release also claims that the acquisition will help the company distribute “new internally designed CPUs” on laptops beginning in the second half of 2022. This is notable because Qualcomm currently relies primarily on “out-of-the-box” ARM CPUs .
Apple is in the process of transitioning from Intel’s Mac line to Apple Silicon, which is also based on the ARM architecture. The company currently relies on Qualcomm for cellular modems, but that is likely to change in the future as Apple develops its own 5G modems.
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