Climate change is on everyone's mind these days, with the outer bay area ablaze, orange skies over San Francisco, and a hurricane season hitting the east coast with alacrity (and it's only the United States in recent two weeks ).
A major - and growing - source of these emissions is data centers, the cloud infrastructure that powers most of our devices and experiences. This has led to some new ideas, like Microsoft's Project Natick underwater data center, which just returned to the surface for testing just over a week ago.
However, despite all the fun experiments, there is a slightly more obvious solution: just make the chips more energy efficient.
That's the thesis of NUVIA, founded by three former Apple chip designers who have been leading the design of the company's line of "A" series chips for the company's iPhone and iPad for years. Those chips are blazingly fast within a very tight energy envelope, and NUVIA's premise is essentially what happens when you take those kinds of energy constraints (and the experience of its chip design team) and apply them to the data center.
We took a deep profile of the company last year when it announced its $ 53 million A Series, so definitely read it to understand the company's founding history and mission. Now, about a year later, he comes back with news of a lot of additional funding.
NUVIA today announced that it has closed a $ 240 million Series B round led by Mithril Capital, with a group of others involved listed below.
Since we last chatted with the company, we now have a little more detail on what it is working on. It has two products in development, a System-on-Chip (SoC) unit called "Orion" and a CPU core called "Phoenix". The company teased a bit of Phoenix's performance last month, although as with most chip companies, it's almost certainly too early to make long-term predictions about how the technology will fit with existing and future chips. that will arrive on the market.
NUVIA's view is that the chips are limited to around 250-300 watts of power given the cooling and power constraints of most data centers. As more cores become common pre-chips, each core will have to make do with less power availability while maintaining performance. NUVIA's technology is trying to solve this problem, reducing the total cost of ownership for data center operators and also improving overall energy efficiency.
There is obviously a lot more work to be done, so expect to see more announcements and product previews from the company as its technology is further finalized. With $ 240 million more in the bank, however, he certainly has the resources to make progress.
Shortly after chatting with the company last year, Apple is suing company founder and CEO Gerald Williams III for breach of contract, with the company claiming that its former chip designer was trying to hunt employees for his fledgling startup. Williams counter-sued earlier this year and the two sides are now in the process of finding their lawsuit, which remains ongoing.
In addition to leading Mithril, the round was held "in collaboration with" the founders of semiconductor giant Marvell (Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai), funds managed by BlackRock, Fidelity and Temasek, as well as Atlantic Bridge and Redline Capital along with investors from Series A Capricorn Investment Group, Dell Technologies Capital, Mayfield, Nepenthe LLC and WRVI Capital.