SiFive raises $400M

SiFive has raised $400 million in a new funding round, valuing the chip-design company at $3.65 billion. (sifive.com) The Series G round was announced April 9 and was 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 said the round was oversubscribed. (sifive.com) SiFive does not manufacture chips itself. It sells processor designs and related intellectual property built on RISC-V, an open instruction set architecture — the basic rulebook that tells a processor which commands it can understand. (riscv.org) RISC-V differs from Arm and x86 because the instruction set is open and royalty-free, which lets chip companies customize processors without licensing a proprietary architecture. RISC-V International says the standard is maintained through member-led technical working groups. (riscv.org) SiFive said the new money will fund its high-performance data center roadmap, including RISC-V central processing unit and artificial intelligence intellectual property for what it called “agentic AI workloads.” Bloomberg reported the company is using the capital to expand its position in artificial intelligence data centers. (sifive.com) (bloomberg.com) Nvidia’s role fits a partnership the two companies disclosed on January 15, when SiFive said it would integrate Nvidia NVLink Fusion into future data-center-class designs. Nvidia says NVLink Fusion lets customers connect custom central processors or accelerators to Nvidia graphics processors over a shared high-bandwidth interconnect. (sifive.com) (nvidia.com) That setup targets a specific problem inside artificial intelligence servers: graphics processors handle most model training and inference, but central processors still manage memory, networking, storage, and orchestration. SiFive is pitching RISC-V processors as that adjacent compute layer rather than as a direct replacement for Nvidia’s graphics processors. (techcrunch.com) (sifive.com) SiFive was founded in 2015 by University of California, Berkeley researchers Krste Asanović, Yunsup Lee, and Andrew Waterman, who were involved in the early development of RISC-V. The company has spent the past decade trying to turn an academic open standard into a commercial alternative for chipmakers. (wikipedia.org) (riscv.org) Reuters reported this financing was framed as strategic support from Nvidia ahead of a possible initial public offering. If SiFive reaches public markets, investors will be betting that open processor designs can win a larger share of the artificial intelligence data center stack. (msn.com)