Alibaba Chip Unit And Ant Group's Payment Service Unite To Launch Chips For Payments

Alibaba Group Holding Limited BABA chip unit T-Head and Alipay, the payment service under Alibaba's financial affiliate Ant Group, prepared to launch computing chips for secure payments based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture.
Alibaba unveiled the chip at its first "Xuantie RISC-V Developer Ecosystem Conference," Reuters reports.
They proposed to embed the chip in hardware devices and enhance mobile payments, which are popular in China via QR codes.
Chinese companies invested heavily in chips amid U.S. export restrictions targeting China's semiconductor sector.
Alipay spokesperson said they would collaborate with other chip-design companies to produce the chips.
T-Head, a unit under Alibaba's cloud computing division, first unveiled its Xuantie series of RISC-V-based core processors in 2019.
Alibaba is one of several Chinese tech companies to invest in RISC-V, an alternate chip architecture. The dominant architecture for most mobile computing chips is from Softbank Group Corp SFTBF SFTBY Arm Ltd.
The open-source nature of RISC-V's design, in theory, makes it less susceptible to export restrictions.
In 2019, Washington imposed export restrictions on China's Huawei Technologies Co Ltd.
In late 2022, the U.S. launched similar export restrictions on Chinese chip fabs and research labs, triggering enthusiasm for RISC-V in China.
As of November, Alibaba proposed to power 20% of its operations with its homebrew CPUs by 2025.
Price Action: BABA shares traded lower by 1.30% at $88.79 on the last check Thursday.

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