Startup Rivos raises $250 million to develop RISC-V AI chips

Chip startup Rivos stated on Tuesday it raised $250 million in a funding spherical that can enable it to create its first server chip geared for man made intelligence.

Nvidia’s combination of chips and CUDA tool dominates the market for AI-linked computing, and Nvidia devoured up more than 80 per cent market piece of AI chips in 2023. But a bunch of startups and chip giants own began to commence competing merchandise, corresponding to Intel’s Gaudi 3 and Meta’s inference chip – each unveiled remaining week.

Rivos is tight-lipped relating to the specifics of the product, but has disclosed that its plans embody designing chips in step with the RISC-V architecture, which is an originate offer different to the architectures made by Arm, Intel and Evolved Micro Devices. Instruction put architectures corresponding to RISC-V are the building blocks of semiconductor designs, and the use of the originate offer different ability Rivos does no longer deserve to pay a license price to Arm.

“RISC-V would no longer own a (substantial) tool ecosystem, so I made up my tips to compose a company and then scheme tool-defined hardware – genuine love what CUDA did with Nvidia,” stated Lip-Bu Tan, founding managing accomplice at Walden Catalyst, one of Rivos’ traders.

Santa Clara, California-based mostly Rivos is within the formulation of designing a server chip that combines a central processing unit and AI accelerator factor that can be optimized for substantial language models and data analytics. The corporate began with the tool distinguished to bring collectively laptop code to enable the chip to scurry a program and designed the processor across the tool.

“Generally the chip corporations discontinue it the opposite path: scheme the silicon, and then scheme the tool on high,” CEO Puneet Kumar urged Reuters in an interview. “We decided, as a company that we must serene first look at tool.”

Matrix Capital Management became once the ideal investor within the funding spherical that also integrated investments from Intel, MediaTek and Dell Technologies.