A company as big as Alibaba isn't putting all of their eggs in one basket. They've probably been playing with both RISC-V and ARM, and will continue to do so.

A company as big as Alibaba isn't putting all of their eggs in one basket. They've probably been playing with both RISC-V and ARM, and will continue to do so. It makes sense to do that even just to hedge against ARM and be in a better negotiating position for negotiating license fees with ARM. 'Wow, those prices are a bit high, would be a shame if someone released even faster RISC-V cores and took the margin out of your mid range offerings...' Additionally, these cores are all very competitive.. in their gate count niche. There's plenty of places for Alibaba to use cores like this that aren't top of the line server processors. So I'd be shocked if they don't continue to play both sides.