SiFive raises $400M
Reports say SiFive raised $400 million at a $3.65 billion valuation to develop RISC‑V CPU designs aimed at AI data centers, with Nvidia reportedly backing the round. The coverage frames the deal as a push toward open instruction-set options for datacenter infrastructure. (coincentral.com)
SiFive said on April 9 that it raised $400 million in a Series G round, valuing the chip-design company at $3.65 billion. (sifive.com) Atreides Management led the round, and SiFive listed Nvidia, Apollo Global Management, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Prosperity7 Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures among the backers. The company said the financing was oversubscribed. (businesswire.com) SiFive said the money will fund its data-center roadmap and expand its RISC-V central processing unit and artificial intelligence intellectual property for “agentic AI workloads.” Reuters reported the company is treating this as its last private round before an initial public offering. (sifive.com) (msn.com) RISC-V is the basic instruction set for a processor, the low-level rulebook that tells software how to talk to a chip. RISC-V International says that rulebook is an open standard, unlike Arm and x86, which are controlled by companies that license or own them. (riscv.org) SiFive sells processor designs built on that open standard rather than manufacturing chips itself. The company’s own RISC-V history page says SiFive was founded in 2015 by Berkeley researchers behind the architecture and has now shipped into more than 2 billion devices with 400 design wins. (sifive.com) The data-center angle has sharpened this year as artificial-intelligence systems need more than graphics processors. On January 15, SiFive said it would integrate Nvidia NVLink Fusion into its data-center-class products so its RISC-V processors can connect more tightly with Nvidia graphics processors and other accelerators. (sifive.com) Nvidia describes NVLink Fusion as a rack-scale interconnect platform for linking custom central processing units and accelerators inside artificial-intelligence servers. That gives context for why Nvidia would back a company selling customizable processor designs for those systems. (nvidia.com) The bet is that cloud companies and chip designers will want more control over the processor next to the graphics processor, not just the accelerator itself. SiFive’s pitch is that an open instruction set lets customers tailor those central processing units without depending on a closed architecture. (riscv.org) (sifive.com) SiFive is not displacing Arm or x86 in servers today, and Reuters described the round as a push into a market still dominated by established chip architectures. The new funding gives the company cash to try that expansion with Nvidia now on both the cap table and the product roadmap. (msn.com)
