RISC-V summit in Shenzhen highlights China's booming chip design industry

As open-source chip design architecture RISC-V enters the fast track of global commercialization, China has become a core growth engine for its development, as the country's RISC-V main control chips market developed rapidly in the past few years.

According to data from Frost & Sullivan, the market size of China's RISC-V main control chips increased from 1.1 billion yuan ($160 million) in 2021 to 37.7 billion yuan in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 139.5 percent.

China's RISC-V main control chips market size is expected to reach 219.4 billion yuan by 2030, according to Frost & Sullivan.

"China's chip design industry maintains a growth rate of nearly 30 percent, with over 300 open RISC-V application scenarios, indicating significant growth potential for the RISC-V industry in the future," Zhou Meng, executive secretary-general of the RISC-V Ecosystem & Industry of China Electronics Standardization Association, said.

Zhou made the remarks during the RISC-V Summit China 2026 in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, on Monday, hosted by the RISC-V International Open Source Laboratory.

The summit attracted over 3,000 professional attendees, along with participation from more than 150 exhibitors and research institutions, with topics discussing the progress of RISC-V industrialization and exploring collaborative opportunities in its ecosystem development.

RISC-V architecture, as one of the three major instruction set architectures globally, offers significant advantages, such as being open-source, flexible in design, and energy-efficient — introducing a new era of architectural democratization in the global chip industry.

During the summit, a number of Chinese high-tech companies unveiled a series of RISC-V-based chips, laying the industrial foundation for Chinese companies to make greater contributions globally.

Earlier, Shenzhen Institute of Computing Sciences and RiVAI Technologies, one of the first companies to engage in high-end RISC-V processor design, jointly established a laboratory to promote RISC-V collaborative innovation and large-scale application.

"We will focus on real AI application scenarios and, based on the results of the joint laboratory, launch integrated solutions," Chen Zhibiao, CEO of the Yashan Database at the Shenzhen Institute of Computing Sciences, said.