Alibaba’s Damo Academy said cumulative shipments of chips built on its XuanTie processor designs have passed six billion units. Chief scientist Meng Jianyi gave the figure at the RISC-V China Summit in Shenzhen.
The research arm used the same stage to introduce the XuanTie E908A, its first automotive-grade processor IP, aimed at safety-critical computing, domain controllers and vehicle gateways. It meets ASIL-B and ASIL-D functional safety requirements.
A roadmap that leaves microcontrollers behind
Damo also laid out where the family goes next. A planned C950A automotive part is pitched at five times the performance of existing automotive RISC-V products and is expected by the end of 2027, targeting autonomous driving and embodied AI rather than body electronics.
The C950, launched earlier this year, already claimed more than three times the performance of its C920 predecessor and was built for AI agent workloads in cloud and high-performance computing.
Meng cited Omdia forecasts that RISC-V processor shipments will grow nearly 30 percent a year and take about a quarter of the global processor market by 2030.
The strategic point
RISC-V is an open instruction set that lets a designer build a CPU without licensing a proprietary core. For Chinese companies working under US export restrictions, that is the appeal: an architecture nobody can switch off.
Six billion units is a volume milestone, not a performance one. Most of that installed base sits in low-cost embedded parts. The automotive push and the server-class C950 are how the family tries to convert volume into margin.
