Beijing is allocating tens of millions of US dollars in subsidies to stimulate growth in the city’s artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain, using entirely domestic technologies, as China invests heavily in its technological self-reliance drive.
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The Yizhuang Development Zone, also known as the Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone, said on Wednesday it aimed to establish a nationally leading AI industry ecosystem valued at 80 billion yuan (US$11 billion) by the end of this year, according to a plan shared on its official WeChat account.
The ecosystem would rely only on Chinese semiconductors, operating systems and open-source software frameworks to ensure self-sufficiency and control, policymakers said.
A key focus would be to “accelerate research and development for high-performance graphics processing units” and support the development of chips based on the RISC-V architecture.
RISC-V stands for the fifth generation of the Reduced Instruction Set Computer, a design philosophy for simplified architectures for central processing units. While not nearly as widely used as Intel’s x86 or Arm’s platforms, RISC-V has been gaining traction because of its open-source code base, especially in mainland China.
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