April 16 (Reuters) - Chip startup Rivos said on Tuesday

it raised $250 million in a funding round that will enable it to

manufacture its first server chip geared for artificial

intelligence.

Nvidia's ( NVDA ) combination of chips and CUDA software

dominates the market for AI-related computing, and Nvidia ( NVDA )

gobbled up more than 80% market share of AI chips in 2023. But a

host of startups and chip giants have started to launch

competing products, such as Intel's ( INTC ) Gaudi 3 and Meta's inference

chip - both unveiled last week.

Rivos is tight-lipped about the specifics of the product,

but has disclosed that its plans include designing chips based

on the RISC-V architecture, which is an open source alternative

to the architectures made by Arm , Intel ( INTC )

and Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD ). Instruction set

architectures such as RISC-V are the building blocks of

semiconductor designs, and using the open source alternative

means Rivos does not have to pay a license fee to Arm.

"RISC-V doesn't have a (large) software ecosystem, so I

decided to form a company and then build software-defined

hardware - just like what CUDA did with Nvidia ( NVDA )," said Lip-Bu

Tan, founding managing partner at Walden Catalyst, one of Rivos'

investors.

Santa Clara, California-based Rivos is in the process of

designing a server chip that combines a central processing unit

and AI accelerator component that will be optimized for large

language models and data analytics. The company began with the

software necessary to compile computer code to allow the chip to

run a program and designed the processor around the software.

"Usually the chip companies do it the other way: build the

silicon, and then build the software on top," CEO Puneet Kumar

told Reuters in an interview. "We decided, as a company that we

should first look at software."

Matrix Capital Management was the largest investor in the

funding round that also included investments from Intel ( INTC ),

MediaTek ( MDTTF ) and Dell Technologies ( DELL ).