Written by Max A. Charney
(Reuters) – Chip startup Livos said on Tuesday it has raised $250 million in a funding round that will enable it to manufacture its first server chip for artificial intelligence.
The combination of Nvidia’s chips and CUDA software dominates the AI-related computing market, with Nvidia controlling more than 80% of the AI chip market share in 2023. However, many startups and chip giants are starting to launch competing products like Intel. Gaudi 3 and Meta inference chips – both announced last week.
Rivos is tight-lipped about product details, but the company said its plans include designing a chip based on the open-source RISC-V architecture, an alternative to architectures from Arm, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices. revealed. Instruction set architectures such as RISC-V are the building blocks of semiconductor designs, and by using open source alternatives, Rivos will avoid having to pay licensing fees to Arm.
“RISC-V doesn’t have a (large) software ecosystem, so we decided to start a company and build software-defined hardware, much like CUDA did with Nvidia,” Walden said Lip-Bu Tan, founding managing partner of . One of the investors in Catalyst and Rivos.
Santa Clara, California-based Rivos is designing a server chip that combines a central processing unit and AI accelerator components that will be optimized for large-scale language models and data analysis. The company designed its processors around software, starting with the software needed to compile computer code so that chips can run programs.
“Typically, semiconductor companies do things a different way. They build silicon and then they build software on top of it,” CEO Puneet Kumar told Reuters in an interview. “As a company, we decided that we should focus on software first.”
Matrix Capital Management was the largest investor in the funding round, which also included investments from Intel, MediaTek, and Dell Technologies.
(Reporting by Max A. Charney in San Francisco; Editing by Leslie Adler)
