Alibaba debuts its latest RISC-V-based chip amid shift to AI agents

Alibaba Group Holding’s research arm Damo Academy has unveiled a chip designed to fuel artificial intelligence agents, as the tech giant bets on open-source RISC-V architecture to ride the wave of agentic AI.

XuanTie C950, the latest flagship in Alibaba’s XuanTie RISC-V series, was introduced at the company’s annual ecosystem conference in Shanghai on Tuesday. Designed for high-performance tasks in cloud computing and AI computing, the C950 is a “CPU core” – the fundamental architecture for a chip – that Alibaba claims to be the most powerful of its kind globally.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Meng Jianyi, chief scientist at Damo Academy, said the C950 delivers more than three times the performance of the C920, a previous generation of the series which also targeted high-performance computing.

The launch comes as AI agents – programmes that are capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of a user or another system – are becoming the latest battlefield for Chinese tech companies, after the OpenAI-backed AI agent OpenClaw took the industry by storm. Tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent Holdings and ByteDance have rushed to launch their own versions or integrate the agent into their apps.

In technical terms, the new chip features an 8-instruction decode width and a 16-stage pipeline, which essentially means the chip can read and execute a vast number of commands.

Alibaba was an early mover in China’s RISC-V space, launching the XuanTie series in 2018. Photo: Douyin

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