Alipay and Alibaba Group Holdings Launch New Chips To Perform Secure Transactions

T-Head, a chip unit of Alibaba Group Holding, and Alipay, a payment service run by Alibaba's financial affiliate Ant Group, have announced the release of computing chips for secure payments based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture.

The news comes as Chinese firms continue to invest heavily in chips in the aftermath of US export restrictions aimed at China's semiconductor sector.

According to Alipay and T-Head, the chip will be embedded in hardware devices and used to improve mobile payments, which are popular in China due to the use of QR codes.

The chips will be placed in commercially available hardware devices soon, according to an Alipay spokesperson, who added that the chips will be produced in collaboration with other chip-design companies.

In 2019, T-Head, a subsidiary of Alibaba's cloud computing division, debuted its Xuantie series of RISC-V-based core processors.

Alibaba is one of several Chinese technology companies investing in RISC-V, an alternative chip architecture. Arm Ltd., based in the United Kingdom, is the dominant architecture for most mobile computing chips.

In theory, the open-source nature of RISC-design V's makes it less vulnerable to export restrictions.

Alibaba unveiled the chip at its first "Xuantie RISC-V Developer Ecosystem Conference," according to the company.

Representatives from Alphabet Inc, Intel Corp, and Imagination Technologies attended the event, according to a press release from Alibaba.

In 2019, the United States imposed export restrictions on China's Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, effectively blocking the company's access to ARM designs.

Similar export restrictions on Chinese chip fabs and research labs were imposed by the US in late 2022.

Against this backdrop, enthusiasm for RISC-V has grown in China, with an increasing number of Chinese companies joining architecture consortiums.

Ni Guangnan, a renowned computer scientist at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, described China as the "backbone" of RISC-V at Thursday's event.

"China's chip industry and the entire chip ecosystem will increasingly focus on the RISC-V architecture," he said, according to reports.