RISC-V and China’s Full Throttle

RISC-V architecture is an open, international standard governing how software interfaces with hardware in a computer. It serves as a shared language that sets the parameters for communication and interoperability. Open standards provide a means for industry participants to collaborate and develop technological solutions that can help accelerate innovation and limit misuse of intellectual property (IP).

With its rapidly expanding global footprint, China is emerging as a significant force in its development and adoption. The upcoming RISC-V Summit China 2025 in Shanghai underscores the nation’s burgeoning contributions to the ecosystem.

In China, state entities and research institutes have eagerly embraced RISC-V in recent years, seeing it as geopolitically neutral. Chinese chip designers are attracted by its lower costs, but the government has yet to mention it in policy.

Its widening use in the country has been greeted warily in the United States, as friction between Washington and Beijing intensifies — especially over technology.

In seeking greater technological autonomy and self-sufficiency, China is looking to RISC-V as an alternative to licensing IP blocks from Western firms such as Intel and Arm. As one Chinese media article puts it: “You cannot build a house on someone else’s foundation.”

Reflecting a longstanding commitment to reducing dependence on US technology, the Chinese government is incentivising the use of RISC-V architecture in chip design, primarily among firms based in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, and more recently in Wuhan.

The RISC-V Industry Alliance convened local startups in a collaboration that had grown to 173 companies by mid-2023.

In 2023, nine leading chip design firms, including Alibaba’s chip unit (T-Head) and Baidu-backed StarFive, formed a patent alliance for RISC-V to enable the sharing of IP and licensing to third parties to promote a “healthy” (i.e., Chinese-centric) open-source environment and the “rapid development” of RISC-V technologies.

China has invested heavily and incentivised engagement in standards-setting processes, seeking to exert more influence over the development and use of technology standards — raising important questions about its impact on the broader networks of innovation, competition, trade, and security. Reflecting its strong endorsement, in March 2025, there were reports that China plans to issue guidance to encourage RISC-V chip use.

The policy guidance on boosting the use of RISC-V chips is being drafted jointly by eight government bodies, including the Cyberspace Administration of China, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the China National Intellectual Property Administration.

Andrea Gallo, CEO of RISC-V International, speaking in an interview, remarked on the consistent global maturity of RISC-V, stating: “Wherever we go in the world, we see the same level of maturity in adopting RISC-V, in working with RISC-V, the same level of technical expertise and contribution.”

However, some policymakers fear an open standard could threaten US national security and competitive advantage. But the openness of the standard does not by itself pose a risk. Indeed, RISC-V does not contain sensitive IP, nor does its cooperative development require firms to divulge IP. Firms compete on technologies developed using this platform, not on the platform itself. RISC-V enhances the competitiveness of US chip design firms by creating a flexible, low-risk, and low-cost platform for collaboration. To capitalise on this opportunity, the United States should continue to support RISC-V for future chip innovation.

China’s robust RISC-V development concentrates in three influential hubs: Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. The RISC-V China summit, organised locally, has historically rotated among these key locations—having been held in Beijing two years ago and Hangzhou last year—reflecting this distributed yet interconnected growth.

Beijing hosts the Beijing Institute of Open-Source Chip (BOSC) initiative, led by Dr Yungang Bao, a prominent figure in the open-source community.

BOSC has developed open-source RISC-V cores and provides comprehensive open-source design tools accessible via browsers. Gallo noted the striking similarity to an initiative in Brazil, where cloud-based tools allow for drag-and-drop RISC-V core building.

The Open Shangshan community, a key component of BOSC, marked an “amazing year” in 2024, according to a video interview with BOSC. They celebrated their “very first Shangshan developer conference in 2024,” which “gathered Shangshan developers, contributors, and partners to exchange ideas and share progress.”

Furthermore, BOSC also hosted an “open Shangshan verification context, teamed up with the UNJ verification team, that is a great success.” This initiative saw “many university students and professional engineers together to find bugs in Sanchan CPU, it was amazing,” noted Gallo.

He also commented that “[BOSC] mission is to promote RISC-V AI instruction set, contribute to open source software stack through treatment approach, deliver high-performance RISC-V AI IP, and finally gather upstream and downstream partners to make the commercialisation of RISC-V AI products.”

RISC-V’s flexibility and accessibility make it an attractive ISA with growing momentum. Early use cases are in the embedded system market, with potential applications in high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as consumer electronics and wearables. There are currently over 2 billion RISC-V-based chips, a number that is projected to grow to 20 billion by 2031. RISC-V International, which has grown in membership from 236 members in 2019 to over 4,600 in 2025, seeks to capitalise on this support.

The Damo Academy, a research and development arm of Alibaba, is based in Hangzhou. Under its XuanTie brand, Alibaba leverages its formidable capabilities in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and big data to drive innovation and build an open-source ecosystem for RISC-V.

XuanTie’s declared mission is to provide “powerful, intelligent, secure, and open new computing architectures and reliable IP for the digital era,” said Gallo.

XuanTie has introduced advanced processors such as the C930 and C908X. The

XuanTie C930 is an ultra-performance, server-oriented 64-bit multi-core processor, featuring a superscalar, out-of-order execution microarchitecture with a 16-stage pipeline.

It is compatible with the RISC-V RVA23 Profile and supports numerous extensions, designed for high-performance computing in areas like PCs, servers, and autonomous driving, achieving a SPECint2006 score exceeding 15/GHz.

Shanghai is identified as another “big poll” in China’s RISC-V landscape. It is already home to significant corporate entities like Nuclei, which offers RISC-V parts certified for automotive standards (ISO 26262).

The RISC-V summit in China typically features a robust mix of academic and corporate participants, a dynamic characteristic of the country’s technology landscape.

Major Chinese companies, including Huawei, HiSilicon, and SMIC, are actively investing in RISC-V tools and development. These collective efforts highlight China’s accelerating role in the global proliferation of the open standard RISC-V architecture.

China now recognises the value of active participation in standards-setting in developing its long-term competitive advantage. As highlighted in the China Standards 2035 plan, China is prioritising investment and engagement in standards-setting bodies with an eye to gaining a competitive advantage for Chinese companies in a broad range of emerging technologies. It would not be prudent to cede standards of leadership. In this context, the United States should move toward exerting active leadership in international standards-setting opportunities — including that posed by RISC-V. This will require both policy attention and greater resources for US participation in standards bodies. The United States must recognise that China has changed the nature of the competition in standards, and the United States needs to adopt a constructive, but affirmative, response together with like-minded countries.

Views expressed are personal