Investing In Our Next Chapter of Growth

SiFive Ushers in the Data Center Era for RISC-V

The explosion of AI and the agentic AI era is placing new and unexpected demands on compute, power efficiency, and customization that legacy hardware architectures were simply not designed to meet.

This moment is not a slow, periodic technological transition; it is a fundamental shift that demands an open, modular, and scalable foundation. At SiFive, we envisioned a day when this would occur, when the need for combining high-performance scalar, vector, and matrix, compute and energy efficiency would collide. That day is here.

Today, we are proud to announce one of the most significant milestones in our journey: a $400M funding round led by Atreides Management with other A-list investors* including Apollo Global Management, NVIDIA, Point72 Turion, and T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Inc., alongside repeat investors Prosperity7 Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures. The financing values the company at $3.65 billion and will accelerate SiFive’s RISC-V CPU and AI IP solutions into the heart of the data center and AI infrastructure markets.

Patrick Moorhead, CEO and Chief Analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, said:

"The data center CPU market is expanding rapidly, and the industry is signaling that it wants more architectural choice. As agentic AI drives a new wave of CPU-intensive inference demand, power efficiency becomes critical to scaling, and open-standard alternatives are moving from theory to practice. SiFive has shipped over 10 billion cores and built multi-generational trust with many of the industry's largest buyers, establishing credibility in high-performance RISC-V IP for the data center. An oversubscribed $400 million round with NVIDIA and Atreides Management participating confirms for me this is real.”

The Journey to the Gold Standard

This new phase for the company is the logical next step after a decade of methodical pioneering growth and foundation-building.

To recap:

Phase 1 (2015–2018): Igniting the Revolution:

SiFive was founded by the inventors of RISC-V to end decades of closed, proprietary hardware ecosystems.

Reflecting on those early technical breakthroughs, Krste Asanović, Co-Founder and Chief Architect, noted:

"In the early days of RISC-V at Berkeley, we recognized that the future of computing would require a clean-slate approach to parallelism, so we focused heavily on the vector extensions for the coming wave of data-intensive workloads. Seeing those early architectural decisions now powering the world’s most advanced AI accelerators is a testament to the longevity and elegance of the RISC-V design. We founded SiFive shortly after creating RISC-V, as a way to commercialize the ISA in IP that customers could design into their SoCs and take to market. It’s been humbling to see how RISC-V has evolved over this past decade, while also preserving the fundamental ideas and design philosophies we created in the very beginning"

As we pioneered both our company and helped build the larger RISC-V community, the initial company goals focused on building confidence in RISC-V and growing a global, standards-based ecosystem. As more companies quickly joined and the architecture matured, customer conversations changed dramatically. They transitioned from questioning “if” RISC-V would take off, to discussing “when” it would become the universal standard ISA.

Phase 2 (2019–2025): Becoming the Undisputed Leader:

Under the leadership of CEO Patrick Little, SiFive scaled our breadth of portfolio and carefully earned a reputation of trust with our customers, establishing SiFive as the gold standard for RISC-V IP. Today, with over 500 design wins and our customers shipping more than 10 billion SiFive-based cores, SiFive has proven-in-silicon quality that customers can rely on. Central to this growth has been our commitment to the global RISC-V community.

Andrew Waterman who also serves as Vice Chair, Privileged Architecture ISA Committee for RISC-V International, emphasized the power of the ecosystem:

"RISC-V is more than just an ISA; it is a global movement. Through my work with RISC-V International, I have seen how a truly open community can out-innovate any single proprietary vendor. This $400M investment is a win for the entire ecosystem, as it proves that open standards are the only way to sustain the rapid pace of innovation required by modern technology. RISC-V International membership now includes hundreds of organizations and technology titans such as NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Microsoft, and Google, representing dozens of industries and it is taught in leading universities around the world."

Since the beginning, SiFive has pioneered the RISC-V ecosystem. A recent, powerful example is the launch of the HiFive Premier™ P550 development board in late 2024. Based on SiFive’s Gen 1 Performance™ CPU IP, the HiFive Premier P550 was the world's highest-performance RISC-V development board and captured massive industry attention. This success led to critical software maturity milestones: NVIDIA committed to porting CUDA to SiFive/RISC-V, Red Hat ported Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, and Canonical ported and optimized Ubuntu for out-of-box support. These were monumental milestones, not just for SiFive, but for the entire RISC-V ecosystem, as industry giants leaned in to accelerate critical data center software maturity on SiFive.

Phase 3 (2026+): The Rise of the Agentic AI Data Center:

As 2026 races by, the data center industry faces massive power constraints. AI is driving compute demand faster than new power plants can be built. Legacy "closed" ISAs cannot scale economically or technically to meet these workloads and hyperscalers are asking for new solutions and choice.

Yunsup Lee, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, explains why SiFive is the answer for the next generation of AI:

"The shift toward agentic AI requires a fundamental rethink of the data center. We need 'Elastic Compute' that can handle complex, branchy logic while maintaining extreme power efficiency. SiFive is uniquely suited for the $100B agentic CPU market because our design methodology allows us to streamline and optimize specifically for our customers' workload requirements. Our depth of experience and knowledge, proven in silicon, makes us the ideal partner to innovate and customize with, at the pace needed to drive AI innovation. We are building the engine that will allow AI agents to economically scale across the globe without breaking the power grid."

SiFive’s 3rd Generation of Performance CPU IP, the P870-D, is up and running in customer silicon and is designed to be highly competitive with the ARM Neoverse N2 class in the data center. The Performance™ P870-D marks the start of the high-performance data center RISC-V CPU era. A new 4th Generation of SiFive Performance™ IP, specifically targeting the topmost tier of data center CPU performance, is already well underway.

Accelerating the Future

The explosive growth of agentic AI is driving a large-scale industry shift: the migration of data center CPU compute from traditional CISC architectures to RISC. This transition, fueled by a surge in compute demand and fixed power constraints, makes this the ideal time to accelerate our investments in the high-performance data center CPU roadmap.

This large injection of capital, on top of our strong financial momentum, including record 2025 revenues that grew >50% YoY, will be channeled into three strategic pillars:

• Advanced R&D: Expand the roadmap of high-performance scalar, vector, and matrix, RISC-V CPU, accelerator, and system IP.
• Software ecosystem: Accelerate data center software development on the SiFive platform, building on existing ports of CUDA, RedHat and Ubuntu.
• Customer enablement: Close collaboration with customers and industry leaders to streamline their path to deployment, such as NVIDIA NVLink Fusion.

Leveraging SiFive’s superior power efficiency and performance, these new IP solutions (CPU cores, clusters and complete system IP) are being tailored for agentic AI workloads in the world's most advanced data center. The goal is to enable hyperscaler customers to achieve industry-leading PPA (Power, Performance, Area) while customizing IP to service their specific workloads and needs.

We have both the expertise and heritage to deliver class leading solutions to the hyperscalers in the form of IP that allows them to differentiate for their unique customer workloads and several are collaborating with us to create our next generation of products.

The Irreversible Shift

Ten years ago, our founders set out to free the world from inflexible, proprietary silicon. Today, as the largest computer platforms on the planet adopt our solutions, we are keeping that promise of choice.

In embedded markets, SiFive is already firmly established as we help bring AI to the edge. Now, we are expanding our focus on the most demanding compute infrastructure, the data center. The shift from proprietary architectures to open compute is now irreversible, and its biggest disruption is yet to come.

Join us. We are hiring. Together, we will build the computing foundations for the AI-driven future.

https://www.sifive.com/careers

*commitments may include investments made by funds and accounts managed by the firms