Oct. 09, 2025 –
By Alex Woodie, HPC Wire
News dropped last week that Meta has acquired Rivos, an AI chip startup that has taped out a CUDA-compatible RISC-V processor with favorable efficiency parameters. The acquisition comes amid a continued scramble for advanced AI chips, and suggests the continued dominance of Nvidia’s GPU is not written in stone, particularly when it comes to hyperscalers and their AI efforts.
Rivos was founded in 2021 by Walden Catalyst Ventures with the goal of developing an advanced system on a chip (SoC) that could easily plug into cloud data centers to power AI without requiring applications to be rewritten. The Santa Clara company aimed to model the proven success of Arm’s proprietary licensing model and the burgeoning ecosystem for ARM chips, but do so with RISC-V, which offers a fully open architecture.