The next big tech war front: RISC-V

Alibaba’s share price dropped nearly 10% on November 17 on the news it has canceled the spin-off and initial public offering (IPO) of its cloud computing division, marking the latest market tremor to hit China’s sanctioned tech industry.

Alibaba said the cancellation was driven by the disruption caused by US bans on China’s access to advanced proprietary semiconductors made by Arm, Intel, AMD and Nvidia.

At the same time, US sanctions are accelerating China’s development of advanced chips using the RISC-V open standard design architecture, giving rise to US Congress calls to extend the China tech bans to RISC-V.