Nvidia backs SiFive round
SiFive raised $400 million at a $3.65 billion valuation with participation from Nvidia, aiming to expand RISC‑V CPU designs for AI data centres. The deal suggests Nvidia is pushing beyond accelerators into system‑level architecture that supports AI infrastructure. (parameter.io)
SiFive has raised $400 million in a financing round backed by Nvidia, putting the chip-design company’s valuation at $3.65 billion. (sifive.com) SiFive said April 9 that the Series G round was oversubscribed and led by Atreides Management, with Apollo Global Management, Nvidia, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Prosperity7 Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participating. (businesswire.com) The company said it will use the money to speed up its high-performance data-center roadmap, expand global engineering teams, and build more RISC-V central processing unit and artificial-intelligence intellectual-property blocks for “agentic AI workloads.” Reuters reported the round is aimed at helping SiFive enter the market for data-center central processors. (reuters.com) RISC-V is the basic instruction set, or rulebook, that tells a processor how to run software. SiFive does not manufacture chips itself; it licenses processor designs and compute subsystems to customers, in a model closer to Arm Holdings than to Intel. (techcrunch.com) That matters in artificial-intelligence data centers because graphics processors handle the heavy math, but central processors still coordinate memory, networking, storage, and the operating system around them. SiFive said central processors are critical for system-level coordination in newer artificial-intelligence setups, especially when power limits are tight. (businesswire.com) Nvidia’s check follows a deeper tie-up announced on January 15, when SiFive said it would integrate Nvidia NVLink Fusion into its data-center products. That technology links processors and accelerators with high-bandwidth, coherent connections so they can share data faster inside an artificial-intelligence system. (sifive.com) SiFive has been moving toward this market for years. Bloomberg reported in 2022 that Intel had explored buying the company for more than $2 billion, a deal that never happened, leaving SiFive to keep building as an independent supplier of RISC-V designs. (bloomberg.com) The new round also arrives as SiFive prepares for a public offering. TechCrunch reported the company has confidentially filed for an initial public offering, making this financing both a product push into artificial-intelligence servers and a balance-sheet step before listing. (techcrunch.com) For Nvidia, the investment adds another way to shape the full rack around its graphics processors, not just the accelerators themselves. For SiFive, it gives fresh capital and a prominent customer-partner as RISC-V tries to win a larger share of data-center computing. (reuters.com)
