SiFive Raises $400 Million at $3.65 Billion Valuation as Nvidia and Apollo Back RISC-V's Push Into AI Data Centers
RISC-V chip designer SiFive closes an oversubscribed Series G round led by Atreides Management, with Nvidia and Apollo Global among the investors, to accelerate open-standard CPU development for agentic AI workloads.
Overview
SiFive, the RISC-V processor design company founded by the architects of the open instruction set at UC Berkeley, has closed an oversubscribed $400 million Series G round that values the company at $3.65 billion. The round was led by Atreides Management, the investment firm founded by former Fidelity executive Gavin Baker, with participation from Nvidia, Apollo Global Management, Point72 Turion, and T. Rowe Price Investment Management, according to TechCrunch. Returning investors Prosperity7 Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures also joined the round.
The raise nearly doubles SiFive’s previous valuation of $2.33 billion, set during a $175 million round in March 2022, as reported by TechCrunch. It represents the largest single investment in a RISC-V company to date and signals intensifying commercial interest in open-standard chip architectures for artificial intelligence infrastructure.
What We Know
SiFive plans to use the capital to expand its global engineering teams and accelerate the development of scalar, vector, and matrix RISC-V CPUs, accelerators, and system IP for data center applications, according to Evertiq. The company is also strengthening its software platform, building on existing compatibility with CUDA, Red Hat, and Ubuntu.
“Hyperscale customers have made it very clear that it is time to accelerate the availability of open standard alternatives for the data center,” SiFive CEO Patrick Little said, as quoted by Evertiq.
Nvidia’s participation is particularly notable. SiFive’s designs are compatible with Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion rack server systems, which allow different CPU architectures to integrate into Nvidia’s AI infrastructure, according to TechCrunch. This collaboration positions RISC-V processors as potential orchestrators alongside Nvidia’s GPU accelerators in next-generation data centers.
Atreides Managing Partner Gavin Baker framed the investment in competitive terms: “SiFive is breaking that paradigm — unleashing the full potential of RISC-V’s open standard exactly when the industry needs it most,” as reported by Evertiq.
The company operates on a licensing model similar to Arm’s historical approach, designing chip architectures that customers can customize and manufacture rather than fabricating silicon directly. SiFive is specifically targeting the emerging market for agentic AI systems, where CPUs coordinate complex multi-step tasks across distributed computing environments.
Market Context
The funding arrives as independent analysts observe RISC-V transitioning from an experimental ecosystem into a commercially viable market. Jon Peddie Research’s Q1 2026 market update describes a “structural shift” away from open-ended customization toward hardened, platform-based productization, according to Jon Peddie Research.
“RISC-V in Q1 2026 finally looks less like a movement and more like a market,” JPR senior analyst David Harold noted in the report. The firm highlighted that major Linux distributions including Canonical, Red Hat, and Yocto now align around the RVA23 silicon specification, a sign that the software ecosystem is maturing alongside the hardware.
SiFive’s round also reflects a broader pattern of investment in open-standard semiconductor alternatives. As previously reported, Tenstorrent launched the first RISC-V AI workstation capable of running 120-billion-parameter models in March. Alibaba’s Xuantie C950, covered earlier this month, staked its claim as the most powerful RISC-V processor to date. Together these developments suggest that RISC-V’s role in AI infrastructure is expanding from embedded controllers to performance-class compute.
What We Don’t Know
SiFive has not disclosed a specific product roadmap or timeline for its data center CPUs. It remains unclear when RISC-V-based processors will be competitive with established x86 and Arm offerings from Intel, AMD, and Ampere in production data center workloads. The company has also not named specific hyperscale customers.
The investor mix — spanning growth equity (Atreides, T. Rowe Price), alternative assets (Apollo), and strategic semiconductor players (Nvidia) — is unusually broad for a chip IP company, but whether this capital base translates into commercial traction or represents speculative positioning on the RISC-V thesis will only become clear as products reach market.