SiFive Raises $400M to Build Open RISC-V Chips for AI Data Centres

Santa Clara: SiFive has raised $400 million in an oversubscribed Series G round, valuing the company at $3.65 billion. The round was led by Atreides Management and backed by Nvidia, Apollo Global Management, D1 Capital Partners, Point72, T. Rowe Price, and Sutter Hill Ventures. CEO Patrick Little described it as the company’s final private fundraise before an IPO.

SiFive was founded in 2015 by the UC Berkeley engineers who created RISC-V, an open-source chip instruction set architecture that any company can use, extend, and commercialize without paying royalties. That stands in direct contrast to the proprietary architectures controlled by Arm and Intel. Arm launched its first in-house silicon product earlier this year, moving from neutral IP licensor to direct hardware competitor. That shift is pushing hyperscalers toward open alternatives, and toward SiFive.

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Nvidia’s presence in the round is strategic as well as financial. In January, SiFive announced NVLink Fusion integration, allowing its RISC-V CPUs to connect directly to Nvidia GPUs via a coherent, high-bandwidth interconnect. The result is RISC-V-based chips that work natively inside Nvidia’s AI factory architecture. SiFive is not competing with Nvidia. It is extending it.

The addressable market is significant. Every major hyperscaler is building custom silicon to reduce reliance on proprietary architectures and cut costs at scale. Amazon has its Trainium chips. Google has TPUs. Meta has MTIA. SiFive offers a different path, licensable, customisable CPU IP built on an open standard that no single company controls. Its IP is already featured in over 500 chip designs. More than 10 billion RISC-V cores have shipped to date.

The $400 million will fund SiFive’s data centre roadmap and expand its global engineering teams. The company achieved record growth in 2025. An IPO timeline has not been confirmed, but the investor roster, the oversubscription, and Little’s own framing leave little ambiguity about the direction.