Nvidia backs SiFive
Reports say Nvidia has invested in SiFive, valuing the RISC‑V chip‑design company at about $3.65 billion as part of an effort to broaden AI infrastructure and open CPU designs. Commentators frame the move as reinforcing the idea that open, modular hardware ecosystems remain strategically important for AI data‑center stacks. (parameter.io) (parameter.io)
Nvidia has joined a $400 million funding round for SiFive, a chip-design company built around the open RISC-V processor standard. (sifive.com) (businesswire.com) SiFive said April 9 that the oversubscribed Series G round values the company 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) (datacenterdynamics.com) SiFive said it will use the money to speed up its data-center roadmap for central processing unit, or CPU, and artificial intelligence intellectual property, or IP, and to expand engineering teams. Reuters reported the company is targeting technology for data-center chips rather than selling finished chips itself. (sifive.com) (msn.com) RISC-V is the basic instruction set a processor follows, like a common grammar for chips, and RISC-V International describes it as an open standard. That differs from proprietary instruction sets such as Arm and x86, where access is controlled by the owner. (riscv.org) (ubuntu.com) SiFive’s business is to license processor blueprints based on that standard, a model closer to Arm’s design-licensing business than to a chip manufacturer such as Intel. SiFive said its IP now appears in more than 500 designs, with more than 10 billion cores shipped to date. (sifive.com) (techcrunch.com) The timing lines up with Nvidia’s push to make its artificial intelligence systems easier to mix with outside chips. Nvidia says its NVLink Fusion platform lets cloud companies and custom chip designers connect their own central processing units and accelerators to Nvidia’s interconnect and rack design. (nvidia.com) SiFive was founded in 2015 by University of California, Berkeley researchers Krste Asanović, Yunsup Lee, and Andrew Waterman, who helped create RISC-V at Berkeley in 2010. The company says it was the first business formed to commercialize RISC-V processor IP. (sifive.com) (riscv.org) This is SiFive’s first announced fundraise since 2022, when PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch put its pre-money valuation at $2.33 billion in a $175 million round led by Coatue Management. The new round lifts that valuation to $3.65 billion as SiFive pitches RISC-V designs for artificial intelligence servers. (techcrunch.com) (finance.yahoo.com) For Nvidia, the investment adds one more alliance around the hardware underneath artificial intelligence systems: not just graphics processors, but the central processors and interconnects that tie whole data-center stacks together. For SiFive, it puts a major artificial intelligence chip supplier on the cap table as it heads toward the next stage of growth. (nvidia.com) (thenextweb.com)
