Former Apple chip executive Gerard Williams III who is being sued by the company after he allegedly poached its employees for his new Nuvia server chips startup is accusing Apple of poaching his employees.
Gerard Williams III, who last year left his job as lead chip architect at Apple and co-founded Nuvia Inc., fired back with counter-claims against his former employer over its breach-of-contract lawsuit. He claims Apple tried to stop his firm from hiring its engineers while simultaneously recruiting staff from Nuvia…
Nuvia is developing a chip to power cloud servers. Williams, who spent nearly a decade at Apple, says he raised the possibility of developing such technology years ago, but the idea was rejected by then-chief executive officer Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, and by Johny Srouji, who’s now Apple’s head of hardware technology, because they thought it would detract from the company’s work on consumer facing technology.
After Nuvia launched, Apple’s vice president of silicon engineering Sribalan Santhanam warned of “consequences” if the startup continued hiring Apple engineers, according to Williams.
MacDailyNews Take: This is certainly not the most amicable of separations. We can’t wait for discovery (if we ever get to that point)!