Meta Acquires AI Chip Startup Rivos to Reduce Nvidia Dependence

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Meta Platforms moves to strengthen in-house semiconductor capabilities with acquisition of RISC-V specialist valued near $2 billion.

Meta Platforms Inc. has acquired chip startup Rivos in a strategic move to bolster its in-house semiconductor development and reduce reliance on external AI chip suppliers, particularly Nvidia, the social media giant confirmed Tuesday.

The Santa Clara, California-based startup, which is backed by Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, is focused on designing chips based on the RISC-V architecture, an open-source alternative to the architectures made by Arm, Intel, and AMD. While Meta declined to disclose financial terms, sources indicated Rivos was near new funding at about a $2 billion valuation.

Strategic Push for Custom Silicon

"Our custom silicon work is progressing quickly and this will further accelerate our efforts," a Meta spokesperson told Reuters. The acquisition comes as Meta intensifies efforts to develop proprietary AI hardware through its Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) program.

Meta's vice president of engineering Yee Jiun Song said in a LinkedIn post that Rivos brings expertise in building full‑stack AI systems, and Meta aims to expand work on the MTIA, its family of custom‑built in‑house chip accelerators.

The timing of the acquisition is notable, as Bloomberg reported that Meta's internal chip development has not progressed as quickly as CEO Mark Zuckerberg would have liked. 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.

RISC-V Architecture Advantage

Rivos specializes in developing graphics processing units (GPUs) and AI accelerators using the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture. 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 RISC-V standard offers Meta greater flexibility and control over chip design compared to proprietary architectures. 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.

Massive AI Spending Plans

The Rivos acquisition aligns with Meta's aggressive capital expenditure strategy for artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company has pledged to spend more than $600 billion on AI over the next three years.

Despite existing internal chip development efforts, Meta currently spends billions of dollars annually purchasing GPUs from Nvidia and other external partners to power its AI workloads, which range from content recommendation systems to generative AI models.

The acquisition of Rivos was disclosed on the same day that Meta announced another significant AI-related deal. A $14.2 billion AI cloud infrastructure partnership with CoreWeave, which operates data centers. Meta has an option to dramatically expand its computing capacity with CoreWeave through 2032.

The acquisition is expected to intensify competition in the AI chip market while potentially pressuring Nvidia's dominance. While Meta will continue purchasing Nvidia GPUs in the near term, the long-term strategy clearly aims to reduce dependence on external suppliers.