Nvidia backs SiFive

Nvidia has invested in SiFive, a chip-design company that just raised $400 million at a $3.65 billion valuation. (sifive.com) SiFive said the Series G round was oversubscribed and led by Atreides Management, with Nvidia, Apollo Global Management, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Prosperity7 Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participating. (sifive.com) The company said on April 9, 2026 that the money will fund its high-performance data center roadmap and expand engineering teams for what it called rising demand from “agentic artificial intelligence” workloads. (businesswire.com) SiFive does not manufacture chips itself. It sells processor designs and related intellectual property built on RISC-V, an open instruction set architecture that lets customers build custom central processing units without licensing Arm or x86 designs. (techcrunch.com) That makes this financing a bet on a different layer of the artificial intelligence stack. Nvidia dominates graphics processing units for training and inference, while SiFive is pitching customizable central processing units that can sit alongside accelerators inside data-center systems. (datacenterdynamics.com) Nvidia and SiFive had already moved closer in January. SiFive said on January 15, 2026 that it would integrate Nvidia NVLink Fusion, Nvidia’s high-bandwidth chip-to-chip interconnect, into its data center-class RISC-V platforms. (sifive.com) In that January announcement, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said NVLink Fusion would bring Nvidia’s interconnect technology to the RISC-V ecosystem, while SiFive chief executive Patrick Little said customers wanted an “open and customizable” path for artificial intelligence infrastructure. (sifive.com) SiFive has been tied to RISC-V since the start. The company was founded in 2015 by the creators of the instruction set, which began at the University of California, Berkeley as an open alternative to proprietary chip architectures. (forbes.com) The company is also framing this round as a step toward the public markets. Multiple reports said the financing is SiFive’s final private round before a planned initial public offering, though the company did not announce a filing date. (thenextweb.com) For Nvidia, the check extends a partnership it had already started building in January. For SiFive, it adds cash and a high-profile customer ecosystem as it tries to turn open RISC-V designs into a bigger part of artificial intelligence data centers. (sifive.com)