Qualcomm is talking to cloud and data center companies about testing an Arm chip for the server market.

Bloomberg reports that the processor was built by Nuvia, which the company acquired for $1.4 billion last year.

Amazon is among the companies that have agreed to look at the chip.

Nuvia
Nuvia's founders – Nuvia

Qualcomm previously tried to enter the Arm server market with the well-received Centriq 2400, but laid off its Arm team as it recovered from a failed hostile takeover by Broadcom, and fought its largest customer, Apple, in court. That team went on to primarily be hired by Microsoft, which is thought to be developing its own Arm chips.

After the layoffs in 2018, Qualcomm stuck to smartphones and other low-power devices. That same year, several Apple veterans launched Nuvia to build Arm chips for the server market - but when Qualcomm acquired it they claimed they were pivoting the tech back towards mobile, IoT, and networking products.

That appears to not be the case, with the company shopping around a server product. Prior to its acquisition, Nuvia had planned to offer a product by 2022.

The chip will compete against cloud providers' own Arm processors, such as AWS' Graviton line, and rival Arm company Ampere. It will also compete with traditional x86 chips from Intel and AMD.

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