On November 2, Sina Finance reported that XuanTie (T-Head), the chip IP arm of Alibaba’s DAMO Academy, disclosed that cumulative shipments of chips built on its licensed RISC-V CPU IP have surpassed 6 billion units, with nearly 400 licensee companies and more than 1,000 licenses granted. XuanTie does not manufacture finished chips itself; its role is to license RISC-V CPU cores to chip design companies, which integrate the cores into their own SoCs before those reach end markets. The 6-billion-unit figure therefore counts all SoC products tape-out and mass-delivered by authorized customers. The model mirrors Arm’s Cortex ecosystem—XuanTie sells the brain of the chip while the book numbers grow on other companies’ silicon—and the count of licensees and their willingness to renew is the truest confidence metric in the IP business.
The growth curve and technical layout are equally notable. From roughly 2.5 billion units in mid-2023 to 4 billion in March 2024 and now beyond 6 billion, the XuanTie ecosystem keeps widening: in March 2026 DAMO Academy disclosed that XuanTie CPUs had shipped in more than 200 mass-produced chips and nearly 1,000 end products spanning AI glasses, power-industrial control, Wi-Fi networking, power management, data security and IoT; licensees such as Xinyi Information and Southchip have each reached annual RISC-V chip shipments at the 100-million-unit level. On the product matrix, XuanTie covers differentiated needs with its C series (high performance), E series (high efficiency) and R series (high real-time), and the Wujian Alliance founded in 2024 brings processor IP, chip design platforms, base software, algorithms and toolchains into one collaboration system. On the high end, the E908A announced at the same summit is the world’s first RISC-V CPU IP to reach both ASIL-B and ASIL-D grades, with single-point fault metrics (SPFM) exceeding 90% for the first time in the industry, targeting safety islands, domain controllers and in-vehicle gateways; on the server side, the XuanTie C950 adopts a 64-bit superscalar out-of-order design with a 16-stage pipeline at 3.2GHz, scoring above 70 in SPECint2006 single-core—touching the performance band of high-end x86 and Arm products—with XuanTie-950-based servers expected to appear next year, and the software stack having already run the full Android 17 on RISC-V chain.
Seen from the industry landscape, domestic RISC-V’s expansion has not climbed a tidy ladder from low end to high end; it has seeped into gravel like water—first filling vast numbers of small, busy control scenarios that lack heroic narratives, then advancing into the depths. In procurement logic, chip companies care about power, area, toolchains, delivery risk and cost, and are rarely willing to pay a faith tax for an instruction set itself; the value of the open RISC-V standard lands precisely on design autonomy, letting teams configure compute cores and extensions around specific workloads. Omdia forecasts RISC-V annual processor shipments of 17 billion by 2030, with industrial applications at 46% and automotive the fastest-growing segment; the industry is corralling software fragmentation through common Profiles and platform specifications—RISC-V International approved Server Platform v1.0 in 2026 and major Linux distributions keep strengthening RVA23 support. The commercial value of the open architecture is being validated within the supply chain, and XuanTie’s path from edge peripherals toward server cores is fully isomorphic with that structure.
For Junyi Microelectronics, the expansion of the RISC-V ecosystem directly broadens the domestic and diversified options for embedded-system BOMs. The J-3568/J-3576/J-3588 core boards carry the main compute on Arm-architecture SoCs, while peripheral control tasks on the factory floor—sensor acquisition, protocol conversion, power management and secure boot—can in the future draw on domestic MCUs and auxiliary chips built on RISC-V cores such as XuanTie’s, forming an “Arm main compute + RISC-V peripheral control” dual-architecture redundancy that reduces single-instruction-set supply risk; K-series edge AI boards and the 5G-EDGE-3399Pro and AI-BOX-3588 edge computing hosts likewise benefit from RISC-V’s scaled landing in power-management silicon at the board level; the peripheral chains of the IPC-i5-1235U industrial mini PC and touch-panel all-in-ones can also gain more flexible supply through multi-architecture MCU sourcing. The E908A’s ASIL-D functional-safety breakthrough further adds a new core option for automotive-grade and wide-temperature industrial board designs.
Source: http://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/2026-11-02/doc-inixkeur0331763.shtml (November 2, 2026)