Meta is set to acquire RISC-V chip startup Rivos, in an effort to shore up Meta's own internal chip development teams and move past reliance on Nvidia GPU hardware. According to Bloomberg, the deal has not yet been made public, but has been confirmed by sources.
Rivos is a "stealth" chip startup, focused on designing GPUs and AI accelerators on the RISC-V open standard. The company's IP includes SoCs and PCIe accelerators.
Meta has long been working on its own custom in-house AI accelerators, in a project termed the "Meta Training and Inference Accelerator." The MTIA chip has been jointly designed with Broadcom, is likely based on RISC-V, and has been produced in TSMC's chip fabs. The Meta accelerator saw a round of tape-outs in March and has reportedly already been deployed in limited use across Meta's data centers in conjunction with Nvidia GPUs and AI accelerators.
It's uncertain what the final deal with Rivos will look like. The startup recently claimed a $2 billion valuation in a recent funding round, likely putting its asking price somewhere in the 9-to-10-figure range. The company may not wish to be dissolved into Meta's in-house development team, which Meta supposedly wants for its new company buyouts. And of course, the rumored deal may not even go through, as we don't know what stage talks are in from the outside.
If Meta does get its hands on Rivos, the company will be newly energized to produce one of the highest-profile RISC-V chips that the world has seen to this point. The RISC-V standard still has yet to reach the U.S. data center in a major way, currently typically seen in MCUs and IoT deployments, though recent announcements from China are bringing consumer tablets and laptops to the market. A RISC-V AI accelerator from Meta to replace the use of Nvidia H200s in-house would certainly be a huge swing for the developing instruction set.
As Meta works to expand its push into AI, spurred on by Mark Zuckerberg's initiative for "personal superintelligence," it has reportedly been looking for new acquisitions to bolster its internal teams. Unnamed sources claim that CEO Zuckerberg has been unhappy with the slow pace of development on the MTIA project, with tape-out of its next generation still a long way out.
In 2022, Apple sued Rivos for allegedly instructing 40 former Apple engineers to steal gigabytes of insider secrets from Apple's SoC teams. The two companies settled in 2024 after Rivos counter-sued Apple, alleging that Apple had attempted to strong-arm its employees into not leaving for the new company.
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