SiFive has announced a landmark partnership with Nvidia that will see it become the first developer of RISC V chip designs to integrate Nvidia’s high speed NVLink technology. The move is expected to significantly strengthen the position of RISC V as an open standard alternative in a semiconductor market increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence workloads.
Like Arm Holdings, SiFive does not manufacture chips itself but provides customers with detailed blueprints that can be used to design custom processors. RISC V, which is built on an open standard, has gained growing attention from major technology companies such as Google and Meta, particularly as questions emerge around Arm’s long term strategy and its ambitions to move beyond licensing into chip design.
Nvidia’s NVLink technology enables fast and efficient connections between central processing units and Nvidia’s AI accelerators, a capability that has become critical in modern data centres where thousands of chips must operate together to handle massive data volumes. Until now, such high speed interconnects have largely been associated with CPUs based on Intel or Arm architectures.
SiFive chief executive Patrick Little said chip designs incorporating NVLink are unlikely to reach the market before 2027, but when they do, they will allow RISC V based CPUs to connect to Nvidia’s leading AI chips at comparable speeds to existing alternatives. He described the partnership as a long term, multi generational commitment aimed at delivering increasingly advanced NVLink solutions over time.
While the companies did not disclose the financial terms of the agreement, the collaboration underscores Nvidia’s expanding influence across the AI ecosystem and signals a significant vote of confidence in RISC V as a viable foundation for future high performance computing and AI infrastructure.