RISC-V

Everyone’s fighting over GPUs. Alibaba just changed the question. On Tuesday, Alibaba’s DAMO Academy unveiled the XuanTie C950 — a 5-nanometer server processor built on open-source RISC-V architecture. It’s the highest-performing RISC-V CPU ever made. But the interesting part isn’t the benchmarks. It’s the thesis behind the chip: that AI agents need fundamentally different silicon than AI chatbots. While Nvidia, AMD, and Intel wage war over who can build the biggest parallel processor for training models, Alibaba is making a deliberate bet on what comes after training. And the logic is harder to dismiss than you’d think. ...

Meta just did something that should make Jensen Huang lose sleep. The company announced four new custom AI chips — the MTIA 300, 400, 450, and 500 — all shipping by late 2027. One is already in production. The rest arrive every six months. Six months. Most chip development cycles take one to two years. Meta is moving at double speed, and the message couldn’t be louder: total Nvidia dependence is over. ...