Nvidia's Quiet Bet on Open Architecture Amid Record Revenue Run

Nvidia backs SiFive's RISC-V CPUs, integrating them with its GPUs for AI. The move hedges its bets as the chip giant posts record revenue and a massive backlog.

While Nvidia's stock trades roughly 11% below its 52-week high of €179.62, the company is making strategic moves beyond its core GPU business. In an over-subscribed Series G funding round that closed on April 9, 2026, Nvidia joined other heavyweight investors like Apollo Global Management and T. Rowe Price to back SiFive, a startup developing high-performance CPUs based on the open RISC-V architecture. The round valued SiFive at $3.65 billion.

This investment is far from a passive capital allocation. It follows a January 2026 announcement from SiFive that it would integrate Nvidia's NVLink-Fusion interface into its data center platform. This technical integration allows RISC-V-based processors to connect directly to Nvidia GPUs with high bandwidth and low latency, a critical advantage for large-scale AI inference workloads. SiFive CPUs are designed to be compatible with the Vera Rubin architecture, which Nvidia unveiled at GTC 2026 for agent-based AI tasks.

"The hyperscale customers have made it very clear that it is time to accelerate open alternatives for the data center," stated SiFive CEO Patrick Little, highlighting the strategic rationale behind the partnership. For Nvidia, the stake is a form of strategic hedging. RISC-V offers an open-source, potentially lower-cost alternative to proprietary chip designs, and influencing this ecosystem grants Nvidia leverage regardless of which CPU architecture ultimately dominates.

This move fits a clear pattern of strategic positioning. Nvidia is actively building a portfolio of investments to shape the entire AI data center architecture. Its holdings extend beyond SiFive to include cloud providers like CoreWeave and Nebius Group, optics firms such as Lumentum and Coherent, and even a $5 billion stake in Intel. The company is methodically extending its influence from the graphics unit to the CPU interconnect.

Operationally, Nvidia's financial engine continues to fire on all cylinders. The company posted record fourth-quarter revenue for fiscal 2026 of $68.1 billion, a staggering 73% year-over-year increase. Full-year revenue surged 65% to $215.9 billion. Management has provided unprecedented forward visibility, citing a backlog exceeding $500 billion for its Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips through the end of 2026. CEO Jensen Huang has suggested these AI chips could generate at least one trillion dollars by 2027.

Despite these formidable fundamentals, the stock has faced headwinds. It gained just over 4% last week to close at €160.26, leaving it about 3% above its 50-day moving average. Analysts note that hedge funds shed shares in March at the fastest pace in 13 years, driven by broader market concerns over oil prices and geopolitical tension. Nvidia was among the stocks caught in this institutional retreat.

The analyst community remains broadly bullish, however. The consensus price target among 53 analysts sits at $275, with an average target of $268.22, indicating significant perceived upside. This optimism is tempered by the immense expectations already baked into the share price regarding the Blackwell rollout and the complex export situation concerning China.

Nvidia's investment in SiFive underscores a critical divide in the tech sector rewarded by the market. Companies providing the physical infrastructure for AI—chips, optical networks, semiconductor equipment—are being lifted. Meanwhile, some traditional software platforms face questions about AI becoming a competitor rather than a complement. As Nvidia quietly builds an ecosystem around open-source chip design, it secures its role at the foundation of the AI boom, even as its stock navigates a disconnect between record performance and near-term market sentiment.