SiFive — AI supply-chain exposure

SiFive is the leading vendor of RISC-V processor IP — it does not make chips, it licenses the CPU blueprints that go inside other people's silicon. Its cores show up as the control and management processors embedded within AI accelerators, and its designs have been used within Google's TPU efforts. That places it in the design-IP layer, upstream of the fabs and the chip designers alike.

The structural leverage is its position beneath many designs at once. RISC-V is an open, royalty-friendly instruction set — an alternative to Arm's licensing model — and as accelerator builders want custom, unencumbered control cores tuned to their silicon, SiFive is a natural supplier. It captures value not from any single chip's success but from the proliferation of custom accelerators generally. The model reads it as a quiet foundational layer: modest centrality on paper, broad reach in practice.