Qualcomm acquired Nuvia back in January 2021. One of leading partners in the chip startup was Gerard Williams III,  Apple's A-Series chip mastermind. With Apple having stunned the market with its new powerhouse M1 processor for Macs, Qualcomm needed a team that could counter Apple's milestone advances for Mac desktops and more importantly, MacBooks. In July 2021, Qualcomm's CEO went out on a limb and claimed that the company would have an M1 challenger by sometime in 2022.

Now that Apple has introduced powerful variants of the M1 with M1 Pro, M1 Max and the latest M1 Ultra, Qualcomm's CEO  Cristiano Amon had to break the bad news that not only was the Nuvia team not able to deliver an M-Series challenger anytime this year as hoped for, the timing was likely going to be pushed out to late 2023 at the earliest.

Amon, answering a question posed by Analyst Chris Caso of Raymod James during Qualcomm's conference call on Wednesday: "As we think about the next generation, we have been developing our own CPU that's been designed by the NUVIA team. And we are going after the performance tier for focus about high scale in the enterprise. And development is on track, and we expect to have that in late 2023."

During the conference call, Amon redefined Qualcomm's mission, according to the official transcript of the call. Amon stated that "advanced processing and artificial intelligence are the fastest-growing silicon content areas for Qualcomm. As such, we can no longer be defined just as a communications company serving one industry, rather, Qualcomm is a leading connected processor company for the intelligent edge serving multiple new end markets and enabling the growth of the cloud-connected economy."

Every company could delay a project and in fact most ambitious projects usually miss original target dates as projects have a mind of their own and issues pop-up that weren't expected. With that said, Apple's M-Series processors so stunned the market that it had Qualcomm and others in a panic having to respond to keep their shareholders and partners calm.

By the time Qualcomm actually introduces a next-gen processor from their Nuvia Team, Apple's chip team led by Johny Scrouji will at minimum be delivering the next-gen M2 or M2 Ultra.

Something tells me that Nuvia's first-gen chips are going to disappoint in markets that Apple is in and remain in the M-Series power shadow for some time. Then again, the Nuvia team is likely to deliver server and AI chips that will go a long way in challenging Intel and AMD.