China bets on open-source chips to counter US sanctions

BEIJING (Reuters) — When a Beijing-based military institute in September published a patent for a new high-performance chip, it offered a glimpse of China’s bid to remake the half-trillion dollar global chip market and withstand U.S. sanctions.

The People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Academy of Military Sciences had used an open-source standard known as RISC-V to reduce malfunctions in chips for cloud computing and smart cars, the patent filing shows.

RISC-V is an instruction set architecture, a computer language used to design anything from smartphone chips to advanced processors for artificial intelligence.

The most common standards are controlled by Western companies: x86, dominated by U.S. firms Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, and Arm, developed by Britain’s Arm Holdings, owned by SoftBank Group.

U.S. and U.K. export controls prevent the sale of only the most advanced x86 and Arm designs - which produce the highest-performance chips - to clients in China.

But as the U.S. widens restrictions on China’s access to advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment, the open-source nature of RISC-V has made it part of Beijing’s plan to curb its dependence on Western technology, although the emerging architecture accounts for a fraction of the chip market.

“The biggest advantage of the RISC-V architecture is that it is geopolitically neutral,” the Shanghai government’s Science and Technology Commission said in a report published in April.

Beijing and dozens of Chinese state entities and research institutes, many sanctioned by Washington, invested at least $50 million in projects involving RISC-V between 2018 and 2023, according to a Reuters review of over 100 Chinese-language academic articles, patents, government documents and tenders, as well as statements from research groups and companies.

While the figure is modest, recent RISC-V breakthroughs and applications in China, many with government funding, have raised Beijing’s hopes that the open-source standard could one day threaten the x86-Arm duopoly, according to state media. Intel and AMD did not respond to questions about the matter, while Arm declined to comment.

RISC-V chips made by Chinese firms and research institutes can now power self-driving cars, artificial-intelligence models and data-storage centers, according to two industry figures and the previously unreported documents.

The military science academy did not respond to a request for comment sent via China’s State Council.

Arm and x86 are closed architectures, meaning they are proprietary and charge users a license fee.

Their outlines are thousands of pages long, with complex instructions and numerous incompatible versions that can only be modified by their developers.