SiFive Raises $400M

SiFive has raised $400 million in new funding as it pushes its chip-design business deeper into artificial intelligence data centers. (sifive.com) The Series G round announced April 9 was oversubscribed and valued SiFive 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) Chief executive Patrick Little told Reuters the company expects this to be its last private round before filing for an initial public offering, though he did not give a date. Reuters also reported that SiFive sells processor blueprints that customers can customize, rather than manufacturing chips itself. (usnews.com) A central processing unit is the general-purpose brain that moves data and runs operating systems, while a graphics processing unit is built to handle many calculations at once. Artificial intelligence servers need both: graphics chips train and run models, and central processors feed them data, memory, and network traffic. (ubuntu.com) SiFive’s bet is on RISC-V, an open instruction set architecture — the rulebook that tells software how to speak to a processor. RISC-V International says the standard is open and royalty-free, which lets companies build custom chips without depending on a single proprietary architecture owner. (riscv.org) That pitch lands as cloud companies are building more of their own silicon for artificial intelligence workloads instead of buying only off-the-shelf parts. Reuters reported SiFive already counts Alphabet’s Google among customers for customizable processor designs. (usnews.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 said in March 2022 that it had raised $175 million at a valuation of more than $2.5 billion. (citybiz.co) (sifive.com) TechCrunch reported the new round is notable because SiFive is trying to challenge the long-established x86 and Arm ecosystems in higher-end computing, not just smaller embedded devices. Nvidia’s participation also ties one of the biggest graphics-chip suppliers to a company building an alternative central-processor foundation for artificial intelligence systems. (techcrunch.com) If SiFive reaches the public markets, it will do so after raising fresh capital to sell more of the underlying rulebook for artificial intelligence servers, not the servers themselves. The round shows investors are still funding the plumbing around artificial intelligence, down to the processor instructions that software follows. (usnews.com) (riscv.org)