Nvidia backs SiFive
SiFive raised $400 million at a $3.65 billion valuation with Nvidia among its backers as the startup pushes open RISC‑V CPU designs aimed at AI datacentres. The funding and strategic support position SiFive as a potential alternative in the broader datacentre architecture beyond accelerators. (parameter.io)
Nvidia has backed SiFive in a $400 million funding round that values the chip-design startup at $3.65 billion. (sifive.com) SiFive announced the oversubscribed Series G on April 9, 2026, saying Atreides Management led the round and that Apollo Global Management, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Prosperity7 Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participated. (sifive.com) The company said the money will speed its high-performance data-center roadmap, expand global engineering teams, and fund central processing unit and artificial intelligence intellectual property aimed at “agentic AI” workloads. (businesswire.com) SiFive does not manufacture chips itself. It sells processor blueprints based on RISC-V, an open instruction set architecture — the basic rulebook a chip follows — that companies can license and customize without relying on x86 from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices or Arm’s proprietary designs. (riscv.org) (techcrunch.com) That matters in artificial intelligence servers because graphics processing units do the heavy math, but central processors still manage memory, networking, storage, and system control around them. Reuters reported SiFive is using the new capital to enter the data-center central processing unit market as demand rises for chips that sit beside accelerators. (finance.yahoo.com) Nvidia’s role is not new. On January 15, 2026, SiFive said it would integrate Nvidia NVLink Fusion, Nvidia’s high-bandwidth chip-to-chip interconnect, into its data-center-class RISC-V platforms so those processors can link more tightly with Nvidia graphics processors and other accelerators. (sifive.com) SiFive traces its roots to the University of California, Berkeley researchers who helped create RISC-V, and the company says the architecture was designed as an open standard from the start. The startup was founded in 2015 by Krste Asanović, Yunsup Lee, and Andrew Waterman. (sifive.com) (crunchbase.com) The backdrop is a chip industry still dominated by a few instruction sets. Arm remains central to many custom server-chip efforts, and Nvidia’s own attempt to buy Arm was challenged by the Federal Trade Commission in 2021 and abandoned in 2022 after regulatory opposition. (ftc.gov) (cnbc.com) SiFive’s new round does not make RISC-V the default design for artificial intelligence data centers. It does give Nvidia a stake in another processor ecosystem as cloud companies look for more control over the chips that feed their graphics-heavy systems. (reuters.com)
