Ask HN: How to get portfolio exposure to RISC-V?
4 micvbang 1 7/20/2025, 9:02:19 PM
I believe RISC-V hardware is going to well in the coming decade. I've been trying to figure out what I can invest in to get exposed to it, but have been unable to find anything with direct exposure but privately held companies, e.g. SiFive.
I'm happy to hear about indirect exposure as well, but I've already got the most obvious cases like e.g. TSMC on my list.
Do you have any ideas for how to get exposure to RISC-V hardware?
Newer, smaller RISC-V first chip companies will only be able to fill niche markets and customer specific applications because they simply won't have the scale or customer base to compete with the giant chip companies.
Will we see a large market for laptops and workstations on RISC-V? Probably not.
But one of the interesting things about RISC-V is you can build extensions on the standard ISA so custom implementations can get application specific hardware additions while still leveraging pretty much the entire open source software stack for development toolchains and general purpose compute. With Arm, you were pretty much limited to what they provided unless you are huge customer like Apple were you had the leverage to negotiate you're own technology and IP agreements.
I don't think RISC-V is a big threat to Arm though. They can also provide their own RISC-V solutions if they felt like they needed to retain customers.
So maybe there's an opportunity for Arm-like, fabless, deisgn services companies that sell custom RISC-V based solutions for their customers. The only companies I know of like that are Synopsys, Cadence and Siemens.