Rivos
More info
- Creator
- Puneet Kumar
- Released
- Type
- Fabless semiconductor company (RISC-V)
- Website
- rivosinc.com
Stealth startup building RISC-V server chips for AI — and the one Apple sued for poaching engineers who brought secrets with them.
Founded in 2021 in Santa Clara, aiming to build a data-center SoC that combines RISC-V cores with built-in acceleration for large language models and analytics — an alternative to the dominant x86-plus-Nvidia stack. Building on RISC-V rather than Arm or x86 is a bet on an open instruction set with no licensing fees.
The company landed in court fast: Apple sued Rivos in 2022, alleging it had recruited chip engineers who took trade secrets with them; the dispute was settled in 2024. The following year Rivos was acquired by Meta, which thereby gained its own server-silicon team rather than simply buying Nvidia.