Alibaba’s XuanTie Chips Top 6B Shipments, Debut Auto Processor

Alibaba Group's Damo Academy has shipped more than 6 billion units of its XuanTie RISC-V processor IP to date, the institute's chief scientist announced at the sixth RISC-V China Summit in Shenzhen, underscoring the growing commercial traction of the open-source chip architecture in the world's largest electronics manufacturing market.

Meng Jianyi, chief scientist at Damo Academy and the lead figure behind its RISC-V processor program, disclosed the cumulative shipment figure at the three-day summit, which ran from October 18 to 20. The milestone marks a significant acceleration from the 4 billion units reported in 2024, when XuanTie crossed that threshold for the first time.

Alongside the shipment update, Damo Academy unveiled the E908A, its first automotive-grade enhanced processor under the XuanTie brand. The move signals Alibaba's intent to extend its RISC-V footprint beyond consumer electronics and embedded systems into the higher-margin, more stringently regulated automotive semiconductor market.

XuanTie's product portfolio spans four series: the C-series targeting high-performance computing and AI-enhanced applications; the R-series designed for high-reliability real-time scenarios; the E-series optimized for low-power embedded and intelligent terminal applications; and the XT-Link series addressing multi-core coherent interconnect architectures. The current flagship, the C950—released in March 2026—operates at up to 3.2GHz, features an 8-decode-wide, 16-stage pipeline microarchitecture, and achieved a SPECint2006 single-core score exceeding 70, targeting cloud computing and high-performance AI workloads.

The broader RISC-V market is projected to expand sharply in the coming years. According to forecasts from Omida, annual global RISC-V processor shipments will grow at nearly 30% per year through 2030, by which point the architecture is expected to account for approximately 25% of total global processor shipments. That trajectory positions RISC-V as a structural alternative to proprietary instruction set architectures, a dynamic with particular relevance for Chinese chip designers navigating an increasingly constrained technology environment.

XuanTie's roots trace to C-Sky Microsystems, founded in 2001 and acquired by Alibaba in 2018, after which Damo Academy launched the XuanTie E902 and formally established the XuanTie brand. The institute has since organized the "Wujian Alliance" to foster an ecosystem around its RISC-V implementations.

RISC-V itself is an open, royalty-free instruction set architecture standard that originated at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. Its governing body, RISC-V International, is headquartered in Switzerland and counts global technology companies among its members.

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