China to Support RISC-V Architecture at National Level

Against the backdrop of growing geopolitical tensions between China and the United States, as well as the accompanying sanctions, Chinese developers are increasingly turning to the open architecture of RISC-V. According to some reports, the Chinese authorities are preparing a number of measures designed to facilitate the spread of RISC-V in the local market and simultaneously regulate it.

Image source: RISC-V

This statement was made by Reuters, citing its own informed sources. As early as this month, China may publish a policy that will promote the distribution of chips with the RISC-V architecture on the local market. The timing of the document’s publication has not been finalized and may be revised. Eight different government departments of the PRC were reportedly involved in developing the program.

The country’s authorities consider the RISC-V processor architecture “politically neutral” and have therefore been advocating for the distribution of processors built on it in government infrastructure for several years. The US government under Biden tried to prohibit American companies from cooperating with Chinese companies amid the exchange of information about RISC-V. In China itself, Alibaba, XuanTie, and Nuclei System Technology are engaged in the commercial use of the architecture. They allow their clients to develop their own chips with the RISC-V architecture for a fee.

Notably, DeepSeek’s language models can be run on RISC-V processors, so the expansion of compatible processors may be driven to some extent by demand for AI accelerators. Even if a RISC-V-based cluster costs about $1.37 million and delivers about 30% of the performance of Nvidia’s solutions, buying three of these systems is still cheaper than buying a system based on Nvidia chips. In addition, the latter are harder to buy in China due to sanctions.