[News] China Reportedly Set to Roll Out Nationwide RISC-V Chip Push, with Policy Expected by March

With building self-reliance for the chip industry becoming one of its top priorities, China plans to promote open-source RISC-V chips nationwide for the first time, according to Reuters. The policy could be issued as soon as this month, the report suggests.

Eight government bodies, including China’s cyber, industry, science, and IP regulators, are drafting the policy, according to sources cited by Reuters.

“RISC-V” stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) and the “V” represents the fifth version of the RISC architecture. It is an open-source chip design used in everything from smartphones to AI server CPUs, which competes with proprietary architectures like x86 (Intel, AMD) and Arm (SoftBank’s Arm Holdings), as per Reuters.

Amid the DeepSeek surge, smaller firms using AI may turn to RISC-V chips for cost savings. The report notes that even if a 10 million yuan RISC-V setup delivers 30% of NVIDIA or Huawei’s performance, purchasing three could still be more affordable.

China’s top RISC-V IP providers include Alibaba’s XuanTie and Nuclei System, which sell processors to chip designers, as highlighted by the report.

A previous Business Korea report suggests that China’s RISC-V ecosystem, which includes 69 national members of RISC-V International, was the third-largest after the European Union (EU) and the U.S.

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