The South China Morning Post reported that Meng Jianyi, chief scientist at Alibaba’s Damo Academy, said at the RISC-V Summit China in Shenzhen on 19 October that more than 6 billion chips based on its XuanTie architecture had shipped.
RISC-V is an open standard for the instructions a processor understands. Chip designers can build different CPUs to follow the same set of commands, as an alternative to Intel’s x86 or Arm’s architecture. XuanTie shipments first exceeded 4 billion in 2024, NeoTeo reported. Damo Academy also announced the E908A, described as its first chip enhanced for automotive-grade use.
Buying a car could eventually involve electronics built around that open standard, if a chip enhanced for automotive-grade use reaches vehicles.
Alibaba says its C950 processor, launched earlier in 2026, delivers more than three times the performance of its predecessor, the C920. Meng cited Omdia’s projection that by 2030 RISC-V processors could make up about 25 per cent of the global processor market. For large AI models, Meng identified the engineering challenge as bringing computation, data movement and software optimisation together.
