Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
The blueprint for roughly one in four new computer chips worldwide is now governed by a Swiss nonprofit that left America expressly to insulate itself from U.S. export controls. This is the story of RISC-V — an open-source chip design standard born at the University of California, Berkeley, whose foundation quietly relocated from Delaware to Switzerland in March 2020. RISC-V International now reports that manufacturers are approaching 2.5 billion processor cores shipped each year (a chip can have more than one processor), and RISC-V has broken a 25-year market duopoly built around x86 and ARM architecture.
Most Hoosiers have never heard of RISC-V. They should have. The decisions Congress makes in the next 12 months will shape whether Indiana’s growing semiconductor sector competes on an open playing field or watches Beijing set the rules.
What RISC-V is
Think of RISC-V as the grammar every computer chip uses to understand instructions. Intel’s x86 and Britain’s ARM are proprietary — you pay to use them. RISC-V is free, and you can extend it yourself. That is why American giants like Google, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Western Digital and Seagate have built RISC-V into their products and why NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses it in spaceflight computing. Openness cuts both ways.
Beijing has noticed
Alibaba’s chip division, T-Head, launched its 5-nanometer RISC-V processor, the XuanTie C950, in March 2026, with roughly 470,000 AI chips shipped since. Beijing is embedding RISC-V into critical infrastructure — finance, energy, telecommunications — as a hedge against U.S. semiconductor sanctions. This is not theoretical.
Why Indiana isn’t a bystander
SK Hynix is building a $3.87 billion advanced-packaging facility in West Lafayette, backed by a $458 million CHIPS Act award. Purdue’s Silicon Crossroads is one of the Department of Defense’s Microelectronics Commons hubs. The chips that will run our tractors, our defense systems and the medical devices in our VA hospitals will pass through Hoosier hands.
As an Iraq war veteran, I ran convoy security missions where our radios, GPS and jammers had to work — every time. Supply-chain integrity is not an abstraction to anyone who has trusted a piece of American electronics to bring their team home.
What Congress should do
U.S. Sen. Jim Banks’ export-control legislation, signed into federal law in August 2025, was a strong first step. Three additional actions would sharpen it.
1. Require export licenses for high-performance RISC-V hardware — not the design standard itself but the finished chips above a performance threshold, including chiplets engineered to slip under it. You cannot export-control a specification. You can control the silicon.
2. Prohibit Entity List companies (those who the government has deemed are security concerns) from leadership within RISC-V International. Chinese military-linked firms already sanctioned by the Commerce Department should not sit on the board or the technical committees of the body that governs this standard. Because that organization’s leadership relies overwhelmingly on American funding and engineers, this leverage works.
3. Tighten enforcement against U.S. persons sharing controlled technology with sanctioned Chinese entities inside standards work. What Congress should not do is order American engineers out of the room entirely. That does not slow China down. It accelerates them.
Beyond restrictions
Every restriction should be paired with investment. Embed RISC-V into engineering curricula through the Semiconductor Research Corp. and fund American participation in international standards organizations. Restriction without investment is retreat dressed up as strength.
The bottom line
RISC-V is not going away. The chips that guard our infrastructure, arm our soldiers and run our farms will use it. The only question is whether Americans write the rules or read them.
Indiana has skin in this game. Congress should act — with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer — before Geneva and Shanghai finish deciding for us.•
__________
Judy, R-Fort Wayne, represents Indiana House District 83, covering portions of Allen and Whitley counties. He is an Iraq war veteran.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.
Editor's note: You can comment on IBJ stories by signing in to your IBJ account. If you have not registered, please sign up for a free account now. Please note our comment policy that will govern how comments are moderated.