In a major move for hardware innovation, SiFive has announced the launching of its new BigSky SF-2U870 datacenter development platform. Timed alongside the Hot Chips event in Santa Clara, California, the hardware represents the world’s first enterprise grade 2U rackable server built on RISC-V technology. Designed hand in hand with hyperscaler clients and ecosystem allies, this turnkey unit gives developers direct physical hardware to test out software, tune intense workloads, and handle complete system validation, bringing open standard processors into real world server racks.

The company aims to simplify and speed up how quickly production ready infrastructure gets deployed. By building around full compliance with the RVA23 standard, the BigSky server cuts out tedious porting barriers, so engineering teams can spin up standard cloud environments without headache. Major operating distributions are ready out of the box, with full support offered for systems like Red Hat RHEL10 and Canonical Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

SiFive has also partnered up with graphics titan NVIDIA, working to adapt CUDA to run natively on SiFive hardware while targeting integration with NVLink Fusion on future iterations. The BigSky platform can already run CUDA workloads, functioning, as a powerful head node driving dynamic large language models on connected GPUs.

Patrick Little, Chairman and CEO of SiFive, highlighted the momentum behind the shift, noting that “SiFive is closely collaborating with industry leaders to accelerate deployment of RISC-V in the datacenter.” He explained that the BigSky system is built to help clients streamline the total cost of ownership for custom silicon projects. Little added, “RISC-V in the datacenter isn’t a distant aspiration any more, it is happening right now, and SiFive is leading the way.”

Industry observers share the excitement over the announcement. Patrick Kennedy, President at Axautik Group and ServeTheHome, called the development servers a major turning point, pointing out that the software ecosystem has matured at an astonishing pace.

Echoing this enthusiasm, Brian “Redbeard” Harrington, Strategist in the CTO Organization at Red Hat, stated, “Getting RHEL 10 running on SiFive’s BigSky platform isn’t just a validation exercise, it’s proof that we’re moving from the ‘theoretical’ phase into production-grade reality.” He emphasized that enterprise users gain crucial flexibility without giving up software stability, adding, “Through the RISE project, we’ve been working to ensure that when we say RISC-V is ready for the datacenter, we mean it.”

Gordan Markuš, Director of Silicon Alliances at Canonical, praised the move as well, emphasizing that out of the box RVA23 compliance gives companies its strongest enterprise software foundation to handle cloud native and artificial intelligence workloads.

Under the hood, the 2U server packs 32 P870-D cores running at 2.0GHz, backed by 256GB of DDR5 memory and 64 total lanes of PCIe Gen5 connectivity. Storage is handled by a fast 3.84 TB U.2 NVMe SSD alongside high speed networking via an OCP 3.0 NIC. The platforms are currently shipping in controlled batches to target primary deployment needs.