RISC-V competes globally with proprietary and more commonly used chip architecture technology including x86, dominated by U.S. firms Intel and Advanced Micro Devices and Arm, developed by SoftBank Group-owned Arm Holdings.

The policy is being drafted jointly by eight government bodies, including the Cyberspace Administration of China, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the China National Intellectual Property Administration. 

In China, state entities and research institutes have embraced RISC-V in recent years, seeing it as geopolitically neutral. Chinese chip designers are attracted by its lower costs, but the government has yet to mention it in policy. Its widening use in the country has been greeted warily in the United States, as friction between Washington and Beijing grows - especially over technology.

China's largest for-profit RISC-V intellectual property providers include Alibaba's XuanTie and startup Nuclei System Technology, which sell commercial RISC-V processors to chip designers. Industry executives at an event focused on RISC-V that was organised by XuanTie last week, said the popularity of DeepSeek could also boost adoption of RISC-V, as the Chinese AI startup's models run efficiently on less-powerful chips.