This investor+customer approach has a history. Yahoo did this with Google (search) and Apple did this with Adobe (laser printers).
If they could shed historical ballast that the established vendors cannot get rid of due to compatibility constraints, it would make sense. But they need to be compatible x86 or ARM (maybe RISC-V) anyway, or else you're talking about boiling the ocean.
NUVIA can't do everything and be everything because they're a startup. They have to make choices. I'm incapable of thinking they'd choose anything but ARMv8. Transmeta learned that x86 is really hard and then you get to compete with Intel. RISC-V is incomplete and I haven't heard much from Esperanto of late.
So I think they're going to build a cloud worthy ARMv8 chip. There's a lot of historical ballast to be shed in just getting rid of x86. Indeed, I think that is both their market opportunity and their market risk.
I don't think the world revolves around Spectre, Meltdown and MDS but designing a microarchitecture that makes them impossible would be gain a lot of market good will.
But at the end of the day, they have outperform Intel.
For one example, if there are many workloads reading same shared resource, the CCPU (Cloud CPU) can use that to reduce access overhead. Even the program might be a shared resource - you can easily run several dozens of copies simultaneously in vectored fashion.
This might be exploited even further - the queueing operations, for example, can be transformed into parallel scans, yielding less than 1 clock cycle for a synchronization on the work queue.
Etc.
Cray tried similar things to somewhat good results with their Athlon-pin-compatible accelerators. But I think we can do and get more.
Understatement of the year. The number of man hours Intel has sunk into optimizing each of these boggles the mind. And this is coming from someone who worked there for 2 years.
With the first problem, they can simplify things considerably by paying an ARM tax. The RISC-V tax is less ($0) but then it offers them less as well. If they design their own ISA, well, good luck with that. Also, clouds like tweaks, so one size won't fit all.
With the second problem, there's fab space to be had for sufficient coin. But there's more to manufacturing than filling out a webform and sending a tape with a check.
If they can get past the first two hurdles and actually deliver silicon which is significantly better than Intel's then marketing to the big clouds should be the least problematic.
Gonna take some money and time. Gulati left Google in March.