Nvidia backs SiFive, nudging RISC‑V
Nvidia participated in a funding round for SiFive, signalling support for the RISC‑V instruction‑set ecosystem as cloud AI infrastructure explores alternatives to x86 and Arm. The move suggests hyperscale vendors are hedging hardware diversity beneath future AI platforms. (digitimes.com)
Nvidia joined SiFive’s new funding round, putting money behind a chip-design company built around the open RISC-V standard. (sifive.com) SiFive said on April 9 that it raised $400 million in an oversubscribed Series G round led by Atreides Management, with Nvidia, Apollo Global Management, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Prosperity7 Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participating. The round valued SiFive at $3.65 billion. (sifive.com) SiFive sells processor intellectual property rather than finished chips, and it said the new cash will fund high-performance central processing unit and artificial intelligence intellectual property for data centers. Reuters reported the company is aiming at the market for data-center central processors used alongside artificial intelligence systems. (reuters.com) RISC-V is the basic instruction set inside a processor — the small vocabulary a chip uses to understand software — and RISC-V International describes it as an open standard instruction set architecture. That makes it different from x86 and Arm, which are controlled by established vendors and licensed on their terms. (riscv.org) (synopsys.com) SiFive was founded in 2015 by the Berkeley researchers behind RISC-V, and the company’s own history page says more than 2 billion SiFive-based devices and 400 design wins had been reached by 2025. The company raised $175 million at a valuation above $2.5 billion in March 2022, so the new round marks a higher price after a four-year gap. (sifive.com 1) (sifive.com 2) The timing lands as cloud and artificial intelligence operators are spending heavily on the parts around graphics processors, not just the graphics processors themselves. SiFive said “agentic AI workloads” are driving demand for central processing unit intellectual property, and its funding will go toward a data-center roadmap. (sifive.com) Arm still dominates much of the chip-design business, especially in phones, and its September 2023 initial public offering priced at $51 a share, valuing the company at more than $54 billion. SiFive is much smaller, but its backers are now funding a direct RISC-V push into the same broader market for licensable processor designs. (cnbc.com) (sec.gov) Nvidia’s check does not mean an immediate shift away from Arm or x86 across the industry. It does show that one of the companies at the center of the artificial intelligence buildout is willing to back another processor standard as data-center designs get more specialized. (sifive.com) (reuters.com)
