Nvidia backs SiFive round
Nvidia led a $400 million funding round in chip‑design firm SiFive, valuing the startup at about $3.65 billion and signalling interest in open RISC‑V CPU designs for AI data centers. The investment suggests a strategic push beyond accelerators toward control of adjacent CPU and architecture layers in AI infrastructure. (parameter.io/nvidia-nvda-backs-3-65b-chip-design-startup-targeting-ai-infrastructure)
Nvidia joined SiFive’s new $400 million funding round as the chip designer pushes deeper into central processors for artificial intelligence data centers. (sifive.com, reuters.com) SiFive announced the Series G round on April 9 and said it values the company at $3.65 billion. Atreides Management led the financing, with Nvidia, Apollo Global Management, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Prosperity7 Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participating. (sifive.com, businesswire.com) SiFive said the money will fund its high-performance data center roadmap, including RISC-V central processing unit and artificial intelligence intellectual property. Reuters reported the company is targeting the market for data-center central processors, not just smaller embedded chips. (sifive.com, reuters.com) RISC-V is the basic instruction language a processor follows, and RISC-V International describes it as an open standard instruction set architecture. That means companies can build chips around the standard without relying on instruction sets controlled by Arm or Intel’s x86 ecosystem. (riscv.org, synopsys.com) SiFive sells processor designs rather than mass-market server chips, so its business sits one layer below the companies that assemble finished systems. The company says its products target data centers, edge computing, automotive, aerospace, and mobile devices. (sifive.com, datacenterdynamics.com) Nvidia already sells its own data-center central processor, Grace, using Arm-based cores alongside its graphics processors in artificial intelligence systems. Nvidia says Grace is built for cloud, enterprise, and data-center workloads, which puts the SiFive investment next to an existing push into the processor layer around its accelerators. (nvidia.com, nvidia.com) Nvidia and Arm also expanded their partnership around NVLink Fusion this month, with Arm saying partners will be able to connect Arm-based compute to Nvidia accelerators through a coherent high-bandwidth link. SiFive’s round adds a second architecture bet at a moment when artificial intelligence server builders are looking for more options around the graphics processor. (newsroom.arm.com, reuters.com) SiFive was founded in 2015 by University of California, Berkeley researchers Krste Asanović, Yunsup Lee, and Andrew Waterman, who helped create RISC-V. The company’s last disclosed private round before this one was a $175 million Series F in March 2022 that valued it at $2.5 billion. (tracxn.com, sacra.com) Reuters said Chief Executive Patrick Little called this round likely the company’s last before an initial public offering. For now, the clearest signal is that one of the biggest names in artificial intelligence chips just put fresh money into an open-standard processor company aimed at the data center. (reuters.com, techcrunch.com)
