Nvidia Backs SiFive Round
Nvidia participated in a roughly $400 million funding round that values SiFive at about $3.65 billion, backing the RISC‑V chip‑design company as it targets AI data‑centre CPUs. The deal positions SiFive as a player focused on open instruction‑set designs for next‑generation AI infrastructure. (parameter.io)
Nvidia has joined a $400 million funding round for SiFive, a chip-design company building central processors for artificial intelligence data centers. (sifive.com) SiFive announced the oversubscribed Series G round on April 9 and said it now carries a $3.65 billion valuation. Atreides Management led the financing, with Apollo Global Management, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Prosperity7 Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participating. (businesswire.com) A processor instruction set is the basic rulebook that tells chips which commands they can understand, and RISC-V is an open version of that rulebook maintained by RISC-V International. SiFive sells designs based on that standard, rather than making finished chips itself. (riscv.org, sifive.com) That open-standard approach puts SiFive in a market long dominated by Arm and x86 designs from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Reuters reported SiFive is using the new money to push into data-center central processor chips as artificial-intelligence spending shifts from graphics processors alone to the full server stack around them. (techcrunch.com, reuters.com) Nvidia and SiFive were already working together before this round. On January 15, SiFive said it would integrate Nvidia NVLink Fusion, the company’s high-speed chip-to-chip connection technology, into its data-center platforms so its processors can link more directly with Nvidia graphics processors and other accelerators. (sifive.com) SiFive said demand from hyperscale customers is driving the push for customizable central processor intellectual property, which lets cloud companies license designs and tailor them before manufacturing. The company said the new capital will fund more engineering hires and speed its roadmap for “agentic” artificial-intelligence workloads in data centers. (sifive.com) The company has been building toward this moment for years. SiFive was founded in 2015 by University of California, Berkeley researchers Krste Asanović, Yunsup Lee, and Andrew Waterman, who helped create the RISC-V architecture. (citybiz.co, sifive.cn) SiFive said its designs now appear in more than 500 products and that more than 10 billion cores based on its intellectual property have shipped to date. Patrick Little, SiFive’s chief executive, said customers want “open standard alternatives” for data centers, a signal that the company is trying to move from embedded chips into the core of artificial-intelligence infrastructure. (sifive.com) The round gives SiFive fresh capital and gives Nvidia a stake in a company trying to make RISC-V a bigger part of the servers that run artificial intelligence. Whether that turns into broad adoption will depend on whether cloud customers choose open central processor designs over the established Arm and x86 ecosystems. (reuters.com, riscv.org)
