Gerard Williams III

Before joining Apple, Williams worked at Arm for 12 years and was a key figure in developing processor architectures such as the Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A15; his past experience also includes Intel.⁠[1][2][3]

In 2010, Williams joined Apple as Senior Director in Platform Architecture, serving as chief architect for all of Apple’s CPU and SoC development. He led the Cyclone, Typhoon, Twister, Hurricane, Monsoon, and Vortex architectures, that is, the A7 through A12 processors; the A7, which debuted in the iPhone 5S in 2013, was the first 64-bit processor for mobile devices. The last generation he led was the A12X, which powered the 2018 iPad Pro.⁠[1][1][1][1][4][1]

Later on, his responsibilities grew from leading the design of Apple’s custom CPU cores to overseeing the layout of the various parts of the SoC. He is listed as an inventor on more than 60 Apple patents, some relating to power management, memory compression, and multicore processor technology.⁠[4][4]

In February 2019, Williams left Apple after nine years and, in the same month, co-founded Nuvia with fellow Apple alumni John BrunoJohn BrunoJohn Bruno is a chip platform architect and ASIC design expert who worked on graphics chips and Fusion processors at ATI and AMD, then founded and led Apple’s silicon competitive analysis group. In 2019 he co-founded the server chip company Nuvia with Gerard Williams III and Manu Gulati, was responsible for system architectures after Nuvia joined Qualcomm, and in 2026 co-founded the CPU design company Nuvacore, where he is SVP of Systems and Strategy.Open the full entry and Manu Gulati, with the goal of creating the world’s leading server processor.⁠[4][5][6]

In August 2019, Apple sued Williams for breach of contract in Santa Clara County Superior Court (San Jose), case number 19-CV-352866. Apple said that its intellectual property agreement with Williams barred him from planning or engaging in business activities competitive with or directly related to Apple’s business or products, and that he had “planned and developed” Nuvia while still employed at Apple, using knowledge gained during almost a decade there to develop technologies later used at Nuvia; Apple also said his criticism of the company in text messages signaled that he was encouraging co-workers to leave and join Nuvia. Apple did not sue Nuvia or the other founders, nor did it claim that Nuvia stole its intellectual property or trade secrets.⁠[5][5][5][5][7]

In his response, Williams accused Apple of a “stunning and disquieting invasion of privacy” over its monitoring of his texts and called the lawsuit a “desperate effort” to shut down a former employee’s lawful employment. In one message cited by Apple, Williams had written that Apple would have “no choice but to purchase” his new company.⁠[5][5][5]

On November 15, 2019, Nuvia came out of stealth mode, announcing that it had raised $53 million from Dell Technologies Capital and several Silicon Valley firms and planned to grow from 60 employees to about 100 by the end of the year. The company was developing a processor code-named Phoenix, aiming to apply the lessons of designing powerful chips for small, battery-powered devices such as iPhones to large, power-hungry data center servers; Williams said they aimed to make a chip faster, more power efficient, and more secure than existing data center processors.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8]

Williams argued that the relevant contract provision conflicted with a California law allowing workers to develop new businesses while employed elsewhere, and asked for the suit to be dismissed. In January 2020, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Mark Pierce issued a tentative ruling rejecting that request, saying the law does not permit an employee to plan and prepare a competitive enterprise before leaving on the employer’s time and with the employer’s resources; the judge also dismissed Williams’ claim that Apple invaded his privacy by reviewing his text messages, and rejected Apple’s bid for punitive damages because Apple had not shown that he intentionally tried to harm his former employer by being disloyal.⁠[9][9][9][9][9]

Williams’ attorney, Claude Stern, said Williams steadfastly denied all the allegations in the complaint and could not be sued simply for coming up with an idea for a new business while at Apple; he also noted the judge’s finding that Apple’s intellectual property agreement “arguably” violated California law by forbidding Williams from soliciting the company’s employees after he left.⁠[9][9][9]

On September 24, 2020, Nuvia announced the close of a $240 million Series B round, led by Mithril Capital in partnership with Marvell founders Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai and funds and accounts managed by BlackRockBlackRockBlackRock is a publicly traded investment management company headquartered in New York, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink and seven others and listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker BLK); its businesses include the iShares family of exchange-traded funds and the Aladdin investment and risk management platform. As of June 30, 2026, its assets under management totaled $15.3 trillion.Open the full entry, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Temasek; it followed a $53 million Series A in November 2019. Nuvia was then developing an SoC code-named Orion and a CPU core code-named Phoenix. Williams, then CEO, said the industry was looking for a new way to get the performance needed to power the next generation of cloud and enterprise computing.⁠[6][6][6][6][6]

On January 13, 2021, Qualcomm announced that its subsidiary Qualcomm Technologies had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Nuvia for approximately $1.4 billion (before working capital and other adjustments), with the three founders and their employees joining Qualcomm. Williams said CPU performance leadership would be critical to the next era of computing innovation and that the combined companies would create a new class of high-performance computing platforms.⁠[10][10][10][10]

On March 16, 2021, Qualcomm completed its acquisition of Nuvia, and Williams became SVP of Engineering at Qualcomm Technologies, continuing to work with John Bruno, who was responsible for system architectures. Qualcomm then expected the first Snapdragon platforms featuring its new internally designed CPUs to sample in the second half of 2022, designed for high-performance ultraportable laptops.⁠[11][11][12][11]

At Qualcomm, Williams was one of the lead designers of its custom Oryon CPU cores and was responsible for the Oryon cores used in Snapdragon flagship chips. The Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus were the first chips with Oryon cores, and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 uses third-generation Oryon cores.⁠[13][14][13][2]

In 2022, Arm sued Qualcomm, alleging that after acquiring Nuvia, Qualcomm breached Nuvia’s architecture license agreement by continuing to use and refusing to destroy CPUs developed under it. When the case was tried in Delaware federal court in December 2024, Williams testified; Arm’s attorney pressed him to acknowledge that the license covered technology belonging to Arm, and he said that Arm technology made up less than one percent of Nuvia’s cores.⁠[15][13][13][13]

In December 2024, the jury found that Qualcomm had not breached Nuvia’s license agreement and that Qualcomm’s products were covered by its own architecture license agreement with Arm, but it could not agree on whether Nuvia had breached. On September 30, 2025, U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika of the District of Delaware ruled that Arm had failed to prove it was harmed by Nuvia’s alleged breach, upheld the jury verdicts in Qualcomm’s favor, and rejected Arm’s request for a new trial.⁠[15][15][15][15]

In April 2023, Apple filed to dismiss its lawsuit against Williams in California state court in San Jose; the filing did not explain why. Williams had earlier filed a countersuit alleging that Apple tried to prevent Nuvia from hiring its engineers while at the same time recruiting Nuvia staff.⁠[16][16][16]

In early 2026, Williams left Qualcomm. In a LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry post, he wrote that his journey with Qualcomm had ended and that he was enjoying time with family, thanked everyone for the past four years together and his friends and colleagues from Nuvia, and said the next chapter would begin with painting his house and working through a long list of things he had made.⁠[14][2][2][2]

On April 15, 2026, Nuvacore, which Williams co-founded with John Bruno and Ram SrinivasanRam SrinivasanRam Srinivasan is a microprocessor and SoC architect specializing in high-throughput CPU/SoC architectures and performance modeling, whose career includes Los Alamos National Laboratory, Intel, Apple, Nuvia, and Qualcomm. In 2026 he co-founded the CPU design company Nuvacore with Gerard Williams III and John Bruno, serving as SVP of Performance.Open the full entry, launched publicly with the backing of Sequoia Capital, aiming to provide a superior CPU for AI computing. Williams is co-founder, president, and CEO, steering the company’s vision to build a new general-purpose core for the next era of computing.⁠[17][17][18][3][3]

In his company profile, he said the team knows what it takes to build world-class CPUs because it has done so across generations of products and platforms. In October 2026, two people familiar with the matter said Nuvacore was raising hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of about $2.5 billion; the round had not closed.⁠[3][19][19][19][19]

Nuvacore: Official website: https://nuvacore.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[20]