Nvidia backs SiFive funding round

Nvidia joined a $400 million funding round for SiFive, betting on a startup that sells processor designs built on the open RISC-V standard. (sifive.com) SiFive said April 9 that the Series G round was oversubscribed and valued the company at $3.65 billion. Atreides Management led the financing, with Apollo Global Management, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Prosperity7 Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures also participating. (sifive.com) The Santa Clara company does not manufacture chips. It licenses central processing unit designs and related intellectual property, and it said the new cash will fund high-performance data-center products aimed at artificial intelligence workloads. (reuters.com) RISC-V is an instruction set architecture, the basic rulebook a processor follows to run software. SiFive’s pitch is that an open standard can give cloud and chip companies an alternative to Arm and x86 designs in servers built for artificial intelligence. (sifive.com) Nvidia’s investment lands as the company pushes beyond graphics processors into a broader stack of artificial intelligence infrastructure, including networking, systems and central processors. Nvidia reported $62.3 billion in fourth-quarter data-center revenue on February 25, up 75% from a year earlier. (nvidianews.nvidia.com) SiFive Chief Executive Patrick Little told Reuters the company expects this to be its last private fundraising round before an initial public offering. Reuters also reported that SiFive wants to break into the market for data-center central processors, where Arm-based designs have been gaining ground. (reuters.com) Investors are also tracking Nvidia’s China business and its next chip roadmap. Nvidia said on February 25 that first-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue would be about $78 billion, and Chief Executive Jensen Huang said in March he sees $1 trillion in sales of Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems through 2027. (nvidianews.nvidia.com) (cnbc.com) China remains a live question for that outlook. Nvidia said in its first-quarter fiscal 2026 results that new United States licensing rules for H20 exports to China forced a $4.5 billion charge, after the company had booked $4.6 billion in H20 sales before the restriction took effect. (nvidianews.nvidia.com) For SiFive, Nvidia’s check adds a strategic name to the cap table as the startup prepares for public markets. For Nvidia, it is a relatively small investment tied to a larger effort to shape what the next generation of artificial intelligence servers looks like. (reuters.com)