Meta’s $2B AI Chip Bet: Acquiring Rivos to Challenge Nvidia’s Dominance?
Meta’s move to acquire Rivos comes amid a major push by Big Tech to own the chips that power AI. The Santa Clara–based startup Rivos is a “stealth” AI-chip developer whose founders include former Apple and AMD engineers reuters.com waldencatalyst.com. Rivos’ CEO Puneet Kumar explains the company’s strategy: by targeting smaller installations, Rivos can offer cost-effective AI chips “where Nvidia might seem like an overkill from a cost perspective,” providing a solution “that works well enough and can compete quite well” waldencatalyst.com. In practice, Rivos is designing its chip around software for large-scale AI models. As Kumar told Reuters, “usually chip companies do it the other way: build the silicon, and then build the software on top... We decided… that we should first look at software” reuters.com.