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Nvidia Just Backed an Open Source Chip Startup at a $3.65 Billion Valuation

SiFive, an eleven-year-old chip design company founded by the UC Berkeley engineers who created the RISC-V open source chip architecture, has raised $400 million in an oversubscribed round that values the company at $3.65 billion. The round was led by Atreides Management and includes a notable new investor: Nvidia.

The reason this matters is the technology behind it. SiFive's chips are built on RISC-V, an open and royalty-free chip architecture that is entirely separate from Intel's x86 or ARM, the two dominant CPU designs that most of the AI hardware industry currently runs on. Until recently, RISC-V was primarily associated with smaller, embedded systems. SiFive is now using this fresh capital to push the technology into AI data centres.

Nvidia is the dominant force in AI computing, and Intel and AMD are its most direct rivals in the CPU space. Rather than simply compete with its rivals on their own terms, Nvidia is backing a startup building CPUs on a completely different and open architecture. SiFive's chip designs are also being built to work directly with Nvidia's CUDA software and its NVLink Fusion rack server system, which allows different CPUs to plug into Nvidia's broader AI infrastructure. In other words, Nvidia is not just making a financial bet on SiFive, it is integrating the company's technology into its own ecosystem.

SiFive's business model is similar to what Arm built its name on, licensing chip designs to companies who then adapt them for their own products rather than manufacturing chips directly. The company had not raised external funding since a $175 million round in 2022, making this a significant step up in both scale and ambition. With Nvidia, Apollo, D1 Capital, T. Rowe Price, and others now backing it, SiFive has the resources and the partners to make a serious run at the AI data centre market on its own terms.