Alibaba debuts its latest RISC-V-based chip amid shift to AI agents
The launch comes as AI agents are becoming the latest battlefield for Chinese tech companies after OpenClaw took the industry by storm
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.
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.
