A broad bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers is asking the Biden administration about its plans to respond to China’s rising use of RISC-V chip design technology, Reuters reported.
RISC-V, pronounced as risk-five, is an open-source instruction set architecture which can be used to develop custom processors for several applications, including artificial intelligence, or AI.
A Reuters’ report from last month noted that that at least four U.S. lawmakers see Chinese use of the technology as a potential national security threat because RISC-V is not included in the chip technology export curbs Washington has imposed on China.
Currently, a wider group of 18 lawmakers which includes five Democrats is asking the U.S. government for how it plans to prevent China “from achieving dominance in … RISC-V technology and leveraging that dominance at the expense of U.S. national and economic security, the report added citing a letter the group sent to Gina Raimondo, U.S. Secretary of Commerce.
The group includes Democratic lawmakers from New Jersey, Florida, Michigan and Indiana as well as Republican chairman and ranking Democrat from a select committee on China in the House of Representatives. The lawmakers also asked the government about how it may apply an existing executive order to require U.S. companies to obtain an export license before working with Chinese companies on RISC-V technology, according to the report.
The RISC-V technology competes with costly proprietary technology from Arm Holdings (NASDAQ:ARM) and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC). Both the U.S. and Chinese companies are embracing the RISC-V technology.
In October, Qualcomm (QCOM) said it was collaborating with Alphabet’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) unit Google to bring a RISC-V based wearables solution for use with Wear OS by Google.
In August, U.S. President Joe Biden had signed an executive order to regulate certain U.S. investments in China in three areas — semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies, and AI. However, China is also planning to step up efforts to build its computing power by more than a third in less than three years, aimed at benefiting local suppliers and strengthen technology self-reliance.