SiFive secures $400M
SiFive raised $400 million at a $3.65 billion valuation with reported backing from NVIDIA to develop RISC-V CPU designs targeted at AI data centers. (parameter.io). The round underscores investor interest in expanding compute options beyond accelerator vendors toward broader chip-architecture plays. (parameter.io).
SiFive said on April 9 that it raised $400 million to build more data-center processor designs around RISC-V, an open chip instruction set. (sifive.com) The Series G round valued the Santa Clara company at $3.65 billion and was oversubscribed, according to SiFive. Atreides Management led the financing, with Apollo Global Management, Nvidia, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Prosperity7 Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participating. (sifive.com) SiFive does not manufacture chips itself. It sells processor intellectual property, or blueprints other companies license and turn into their own silicon. (reuters.com) RISC-V is the rulebook a processor follows to run software, much like grammar rules for a language. Because the standard is open, companies can customize designs without paying the licensing fees associated with Arm, the British chip architecture company, or building a new instruction set from scratch. (reuters.com) SiFive said it will use the new money to speed its high-performance central processing unit and artificial intelligence intellectual property roadmap for data centers. Reuters reported the company is trying to enter the market for data-center central processors, where Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have long dominated and Arm-based designs are gaining share. (sifive.com) (reuters.com) Nvidia’s role goes beyond writing a check. In January, SiFive said its future data-center platforms would support Nvidia NVLink Fusion, the interconnect technology Nvidia uses to link processors and accelerators inside artificial intelligence systems. (sifive.com) That pairing targets a bottleneck in artificial intelligence infrastructure. Graphics processors handle most model training and inference, but central processors still manage memory, storage, networking, and the software stack that keeps clusters running. (reuters.com) SiFive has been pushing toward this market for more than a year. In July 2024, the company introduced the Performance P870-D, a data-center-focused processor platform it said was built for artificial intelligence workloads. (datacenterdynamics.com) The company was founded in 2015 by researchers tied to the University of California, Berkeley, where RISC-V originated. Reuters reported that Qualcomm tried to buy SiFive for more than $2 billion in 2021, but the deal did not happen. (reuters.com) The new round gives SiFive cash to keep selling an open alternative in a data-center market that is still ruled by a small group of processor and accelerator vendors. (sifive.com) (reuters.com)
