Every instruction set that matters can be embargoed, except one. Arm is British-owned and licence-gated; x86 belongs to Intel and AMD. RISC-V, an open standard anyone can use for free, belongs to no one, which is exactly why China is betting on it.
The bet is national. In March 2025, Reuters reported that eight Chinese government bodies were preparing the country’s first national policy to promote RISC-V adoption, to cut reliance on Western-controlled chip architectures.[1] China already shapes the standard: of RISC-V International’s 24 top-tier “premier” members, twelve are Chinese, more than the United States.[2] And the designs are climbing from microcontrollers toward real computers: Alibaba’s T-Head has launched server-grade RISC-V cores it says can run large language models natively, while the open-source XiangShan project, led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, aims to be “the Linux of processors.”[3][4]
An open standard is not a free lunch
Two caveats keep this in proportion. First, an open instruction set does not solve manufacturing: Alibaba’s most advanced RISC-V chip is reportedly fabricated by TSMC on 5nm; China’s best design still leans on a foreign leading-edge foundry.[3] Second, the geopolitics cut both ways: US lawmakers have proposed restricting American collaboration on RISC-V with Chinese entities, though it remains a proposal, not law, and analysts warn that walling off a global open standard may simply cede influence over it.[2]
Arm and x86 can be cut off. An open ISA can’t — so China now holds half the top seats at RISC-V’s own table.
The clean way to size the RISC-V bet is to see exactly which dependency it removes and which it leaves untouched. It removes a licensing dependency: an open instruction set cannot be embargoed the way Arm or x86 can, and China’s outsized presence on the standard body converts that into genuine influence over the architecture’s direction. It does nothing for the manufacturing dependency, as the fact that the most advanced Chinese RISC-V chip is fabricated abroad makes plain. An architecture is one layer of a deep stack; solving it is real progress and, on its own, not nearly enough, which is why the standards-body politics deserve as much attention as the silicon.
The read for allocators
RISC-V is China’s cleanest hedge against IP-based export controls, and its influence over the standard is a durable, under-priced form of leverage. But an architecture is only one layer of the stack: it removes a licensing dependency, not a manufacturing one. We read China’s RISC-V push as a long-term structural bet, strongest in embedded, IoT and increasingly AI, and we watch the standards-body politics as closely as the silicon, because that is where this contest is actually being decided.
| Ref | Publication | Date | Supports |
|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | Reuters | Mar 2025 | Eight bodies drafting national RISC-V policy |
| [2] | CSIS | Apr 2025 | Premier-member count and US restriction proposals |
| [3] | The Register | Mar 2025 | T-Head server cores and the TSMC 5nm dependency |
| [4] | South China Morning Post | Jan 2025 | The XiangShan open-source CPU project |
References
- Reuters, “China to publish policy to boost RISC-V chip use nationwide, sources say,” Mar 2025. Read source ↗
- CSIS, “Sustaining Standards Leadership: The United States Cannot Disengage from RISC-V,” Apr 2025. Read source ↗
- The Register, “As Alibaba launches server-grade RISC-V CPU, Beijing throws its weight behind ISA,” Mar 2025. Read source ↗
- South China Morning Post, “Chip war: Chinese scientists vow to launch breakthrough RISC-V open-source CPU in 2025,” Jan 2025. Read source ↗
Every source above is public and linked. This is a research brief from Singularity Dynamics; full briefings on this topic are available on request.