Alibaba's RISC-V Chips Surpass 6 Billion Shipments, Target AI Growth

Alibaba Group Holding's research arm, Damo Academy, has seen more than 6 billion chips shipped based on the academy's XuanTie RISC-V architecture. Meng Jianyi, chief scientist at Damo Academy, announced the figure on Monday at the annual RISC-V Summit China in Shenzhen. Alibaba is increasing investment in the open standard for artificial intelligence and automotive systems.

Companies in China are seeking a greater role in the global RISC-V ecosystem, an alternative to established chip architectures developed by Intel and Arm. Hangzhou-based Alibaba was an early participant in China's RISC-V sector and is expanding Alibaba's AI infrastructure capabilities. The open standard allows developers to design processors while potentially reducing reliance on foreign chip-design technologies amid US-led export restrictions.

Meng cited research firm Omdia's forecast that global RISC-V processor shipments would grow by nearly 30% annually. Omdia forecast that RISC-V processors could account for about 25% of the worldwide processor market by 2030.

The shipment milestone follows the launch earlier this year of the flagship XuanTie C950 RISC-V processor. Alibaba called the C950 the most powerful processor of its kind globally. Alibaba said the C950 was developed to support AI agents and other workloads in cloud and high-performance computing environments. Alibaba said the C950 delivered more than three times the performance of the C920 predecessor.

The C950 forms part of a broader effort by technology companies in China to develop computing infrastructure for AI. Alibaba, Tencent Holdings and ByteDance are competing to develop AI agents and integrate the agents into the companies' apps. AI agents are software that can autonomously perform tasks on behalf of users or other systems.

RISC-V, short for fifth-generation reduced instruction set computer, is an open-standard instruction set architecture that allows developers to design central processing units (CPUs). The nonprofit RISC-V International manages the architecture. RISC-V is free for anyone to use and modify and is considered a potential route to greater self-sufficiency in chip design for China. The architecture offers an alternative to Intel's x86 architecture and Arm's namesake architecture. Intel's x86 architecture powers devices running Microsoft Windows, while Arm's architecture powers devices running Google Android.

However, Meng highlighted engineering challenges as Alibaba seeks to improve RISC-V CPU performance when running large language models. Meng called co-design the biggest challenge in an interview with RISC-V International that Damo Academy released last week. Meng said isolated raw computing power means little and that balancing computation, data movement and software optimisation is essential. Meng said techniques such as quantisation, matrix instructions and memory bandwidth must be integrated as a unified system for large AI models such as Qwen3.8-27B.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.