SiFive raised $400 million in an oversubscribed round that valued the chip-design company at $3.65 billion. Nvidia joined a group of investors led by Atreides Management. Founded in 2015 by UC Berkeley engineers who created RISC-V, SiFive licenses processor designs that customers can adapt and sells no finished chips. Its architecture offers an alternative to the x86 and Arm CPUs commonly paired with Nvidia GPUs. SiFive is now moving further into AI data centers, and its designs are set to work with Nvidia CUDA software and NVLink Fusion, a rack system designed to connect different CPUs to Nvidia infrastructure.

An open instruction set gains political force only when factories, software and customers can use it. Nvidia's investment places RISC-V inside an arrangement still organized around CUDA and Nvidia's rack technology. That combination gives hardware makers another CPU design while preserving the gravitational pull of the dominant GPU supplier. Openness here works as a negotiated layer of industrial power, available for modification yet entering data centers through interfaces controlled by a much larger company. The deal also exposes how standards travel. An architecture associated with embedded devices can reach expensive AI servers once capital and compatibility arrive together. Engineers may alter SiFive's licensed designs for particular workloads, but those processors will meet Nvidia's software and interconnect at the rack.