EVAS Intelligence Raises Nearly $280 Million to Scale RISC-V AI Chips in Beijing

Beijing-based EVAS Intelligence raised nearly RMB 2 billion, roughly $280 million, in a new financing round at a reported post-money valuation approaching RMB 15 billion, about $2.1 billion. More than 20 investors participated, including Huatai Innovation, Eastern Bell Capital, SMIC-linked Zhongxin Juyuan, 9F Medical, Ren'ai Capital, Tongfu Microelectronics and several other industrial and financial investors.

The round follows a RMB 1.5 billion Series B earlier this year plus a strategic investment from China Mobile, giving EVAS an unusually fast fundraising cadence even by AI-chip standards. The company's first Epoch processors are already reportedly in volume production, and EVAS has built systems spanning chips, boards, servers, supernodes and full clusters around its architecture.

The core strategic bet is RISC-V, an open instruction-set architecture that chip designers can customize without the licensing model tied to proprietary architectures. EVAS combines RISC-V with its internally developed EVAMIND accelerator architecture to target cloud and data-center AI workloads. The appeal extends beyond raw chip performance: an open instruction set gives Chinese chip designers a path to build processors, software and systems without depending entirely on architectures controlled by companies elsewhere, a consideration that has become increasingly central to how Chinese investors evaluate semiconductor bets.

EVAS says its next-generation cloud chip has already taped out and delivers several times the compute and interconnect performance of its first generation. The harder challenge ahead is software rather than silicon. AI chips compete as ecosystems, not isolated pieces of hardware, and developers need mature compilers, libraries, orchestration tooling and networking support before an alternative accelerator architecture becomes genuinely competitive with entrenched incumbents, regardless of how strong its underlying chip performance looks on paper.

The investor list is also instructive. Alongside financial investors like Huatai Innovation and Eastern Bell Capital sit strategic and industrial names, an SMIC-linked investment vehicle, a healthcare-adjacent investor in 9F Medical, and a semiconductor packaging and testing specialist in Tongfu Microelectronics, spanning fabrication, packaging and downstream application interests across a single cap table. That breadth suggests EVAS is being positioned as connective infrastructure across China's broader semiconductor supply chain rather than as a single-product chip startup competing narrowly on benchmark performance against established accelerator vendors.

For founders and investors watching the broader AI infrastructure buildout, EVAS is a useful data point on how much capital is now flowing into alternatives to conventional chip architectures specifically, rather than into applications built on top of existing compute.

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