SiFive raises $400m with Nvidia backing
SiFive raised $400m at a $3.65bn valuation to build RISC‑V CPU designs intended for AI data centres, and the round counts Nvidia as a backer. Parameter reports the funding as part of a push to diversify AI stacks beyond GPUs into open RISC‑V CPU designs for large-scale AI infrastructure. (parameter.io)
SiFive has raised $400 million with Nvidia as an investor to push its RISC-V processor designs deeper into artificial intelligence data centers. (sifive.com) The company said April 9 that the Series G round was oversubscribed and valued SiFive at $3.65 billion. Atreides Management led the financing, with Apollo Global Management, Nvidia, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Prosperity7 Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participating. (sifive.com) SiFive does not manufacture chips itself; it sells processor blueprints and related intellectual property that other companies can license and build into silicon. Reuters reported the new money is aimed at entering the market for data-center central processing units, the general-purpose chips that feed work to graphics processors and keep large systems running. (reuters.com) RISC-V is the basic instruction set, or rulebook, a processor follows to run software, and RISC-V International describes it as an open standard rather than a proprietary one controlled by a single vendor. That makes it different from architectures such as Arm or x86, where licensing and control sit with specific companies. (riscv.org) Artificial intelligence servers still rely heavily on graphics processors for training and inference, but those systems also need central processors to manage memory, networking, storage, and orchestration. SiFive said “agentic AI workloads” are driving more demand for that central processing unit intellectual property inside data centers. (sifive.com) Nvidia’s check fits a broader technical relationship that was already public before this funding round. On January 15, SiFive said it would integrate Nvidia NVLink Fusion, a high-speed chip-to-chip connection, into its high-performance data-center platforms so its processors can link more tightly with Nvidia graphics processors and other accelerators. (sifive.com) That pairing matters because Nvidia already sells its own Arm-based Grace central processors for artificial intelligence systems, while SiFive is betting customers will also want an open-standard alternative. Reuters reported SiFive is targeting the same broad data-center processor market now dominated by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, with Arm-based designs also gaining ground. (reuters.com) SiFive has been building toward this moment for years. The company was founded in 2015 by engineers tied to the University of California, Berkeley, where RISC-V originated, and The Next Web reported this round is being framed as SiFive’s last private financing before a planned initial public offering. (thenextweb.com) For now, the financing gives SiFive cash, a higher valuation, and a public endorsement from Nvidia as it tries to turn an open instruction set into a larger foothold in artificial intelligence infrastructure. (sifive.com)
