<div id="readability-page-1">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.  Through co-optimised software and hardware, the C950 delivers leading performance for cloud computing tasks including MySQL, Redis, Nginx and OpenSSL. It can also power inferencing of large language models including Qwen and DeepSeek when used alongside the company’s self-developed AI computing engines – the Vector Acceleration Engine and the Matrix Acceleration Engine – which were also launched on Tuesday. The C950 represents the latest move by the Hangzhou-based company to boost its capabilities in AI infrastructure and counter US chip restrictions by leveraging the open-standard architecture which is free of US export controls. RISC-V, the fifth generation of the Reduced Instruction Set Computer, became available for chip developers to configure and customise under the Switzerland-based non-profit RISC-V International in 2015. As an open-source project, it is free for anyone to use and modify, making it one of China’s best hopes for achieving self-sufficiency in chip design instead of relying on Intel’s x86 and Arm’s namesake architecture, which power the Microsoft Windows and Google Android operating systems, respectively. The open-standard nature allowed chip designers to “customise instruction sets and accelerate specific AI workloads with no or low licensing fees”, Alibaba said. This was important for the development of AI agents as they were running across a vast spectrum of devices and consumed massive computing resources, it added. Alibaba was an early mover in China’s RISC-V space, launching the XuanTie series in 2018. Chips in the series that have gained wide industry adoption include the C910 launched in 2019 and C920 in 2024.  The new chip followed the launch of the C930 at the same event a year ago, which marked the company’s first server-grade CPU. On Tuesday, the company also launched the C925, an optimised version of the C930 with higher energy efficiency. “Alibaba is leading in China for RISC-V development and deployment,” Lu Dai, board chair of RISC-V International, said at the event. The architecture was now undergoing a shift from “purely technology development” to deployment, putting a greater focus on the ecosystem, he added. Separately, T-Head, Alibaba’s chip design unit, has shipped more than 470,000 AI chips as of February and was nearing 10 billion yuan (US$1.45 billion) in annual revenue over the past two years, the company said during its earnings call last week. </div>

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<p>Alibaba's Damo Academy has launched the XuanTie C950 chip, claiming it to be the most powerful CPU core globally, designed for AI and cloud computing. The C950 offers over three times the performance of its predecessor, the C920. This release aligns with the growing competition among Chinese tech firms in AI agents, following the success of OpenAI's OpenClaw. The chip utilizes open-source RISC-V architecture, allowing customization for AI workloads, and represents Alibaba's commitment to enhancing its AI infrastructure amid US chip restrictions. The company has also reported significant revenue growth in its AI chip segment.</p>

Alibaba debuts what it calls most powerful CPU core of its kind