RISC-V Explained: The Free Chip Blueprint Quietly Taking On Arm — and Why Abu Dhabi Got in Early

For four decades, almost every processor you've ever touched has run on an instruction set someone else owns. Your phone's chip speaks Arm's language and pays Arm a royalty for the privilege. Your laptop almost certainly speaks Intel or AMD's x86, a lineage so old it traces back to the 1970s. These instruction set architectures (ISAs) are the basic vocabulary a chip understands — and for most of computing history, that vocabulary has been proprietary, licensed, and tightly controlled.

RISC-V breaks that model. It's an open, royalty-free ISA that anyone can use to design a chip without paying a licensing fee or asking permission — and in the past two years it has gone from an academic curiosity to a genuine strategic bet by some of the biggest names in silicon, including a research institute based right here in Abu Dhabi.

What RISC-V Actually Is

RISC-V (pronounced "risk-five") started as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley around 2010. The "V" refers to the fifth generation of a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) design the university had iterated on. Unlike Arm, which licenses its ISA and often its chip designs to companies like Qualcomm and Apple for a fee, or x86, which Intel and AMD keep entirely in-house, RISC-V's specification is published freely by the nonprofit RISC-V International, now headquartered in Switzerland.

That doesn't mean RISC-V chips are free to make — someone still has to design the actual silicon, which costs real money — but it does mean no company has to pay a toll just to use the instruction set itself, and anyone is free to extend it with custom instructions for their specific workload. For companies that want a chip tailored to one job — a storage controller, a sensor, an AI accelerator — that flexibility without a licensing bill is the whole appeal.

Why Big Names Are Suddenly Betting on It

The clearest sign that RISC-V has moved beyond hobbyist projects came in December 2025, when Qualcomm announced it was acquiring Ventana Micro Systems, a Cupertino-based startup that had been building RISC-V processor cores designed to compete with Arm and x86 chips in data centers. Qualcomm said the move would fold Ventana's RISC-V engineering team and instruction-set expertise into its own CPU roadmap, alongside its existing Oryon core program, extending its ambitions from phones into edge computing and data centers.

Qualcomm isn't alone. It's also a member of Quintauris, a joint venture it formed with automotive chip giants Bosch, Infineon, NXP, and STMicroelectronics to build a standardized RISC-V computing platform for cars — an industry where custom, cost-controlled silicon matters more than raw brand-name performance.

The storage industry got there even earlier. Back in 2017, Western Digital announced it would shift its future processor, controller, and core development to RISC-V, citing the sheer scale of its needs — the company said it was already shipping over a billion processor cores a year across its hard drives and storage products, and expected that figure to roughly double once the transition completed. For a company buying silicon at that volume, even a small per-chip royalty adds up fast; owning the ISA outright removes that cost entirely.

On the software side, the ecosystem is catching up too: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS became the first major Linux distribution to target RISC-V's RVA23 profile exclusively for its high-performance builds, a signal that mainstream operating systems now treat RISC-V as a first-class target rather than an experimental one.

The Abu Dhabi Connection

RISC-V's open model has also made it attractive to governments and research institutions chasing a degree of technological self-reliance — and the UAE has been involved for longer than most people realize.

In June 2021, the Secure Systems Research Center at Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute (TII) became a strategic member of RISC-V International. That same month, it launched a project with five universities — including Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, alongside partners in Italy, Canada, and Portugal — to build an open RISC-V-based system-on-chip architecture for drone flight computers. By December 2021, the team had its first working RISC-V-based flight controller running a secure version of the PX4 autopilot stack used in many drones.

That effort culminated in August 2022 with Shaheen, described by TII as the UAE's first RISC-V-based test chip, developed with Khalifa University's System-on-Chip Lab and partners including the University of Bologna, NYU Abu Dhabi, Cadence Design Systems, Siemens EDA, and chipmaker GlobalFoundries. TII positioned Shaheen as a stepping stone toward a planned production chip it called Al Saqr.

That early groundwork fits a broader pattern in how the UAE is approaching chip sovereignty. Rather than racing to build multibillion-dollar fabrication plants — talks with TSMC and Samsung over Gulf fabs have been reported but haven't progressed far, partly due to US export-control sensitivities tied to the region's ties with China — analysts have pointed to a "design-only" strategy as the more realistic near-term path: controlling chip intellectual property and architecture, even when manufacturing happens elsewhere. An open, unencumbered ISA like RISC-V is a natural fit for that approach, since it lets a country build real design expertise without needing a license from Arm or Intel first.

What to Watch Next

RISC-V isn't about to replace Arm in your next phone or x86 in your next laptop — the software ecosystems around those architectures took decades to mature, and that inertia is hard to overcome. But in categories where a company controls both the chip and the software stack running on it — storage controllers, automotive systems, drones, and increasingly data center accelerators — the calculus is shifting. When Qualcomm, one of the biggest Arm licensees on the planet, starts buying RISC-V startups, that's less a hedge and more an admission that the open-silicon model has crossed from promising to unavoidable.