As China pushes for semiconductor self-sufficiency, it’s found an unlikely ally: an international foundation dedicated to open source technology, with its origins in California’s libertarian computer culture. When it comes to a core chip element known as “instruction set architecture,” the vital semiconductor component that allows a chip’s hardware and software to communicate, the global market is locked up by two companies: the U.S.’s Intel, which dominates computing, and Arm, a Japanese-owned, U.K.-based company that supplies almost all smartphone chip architecture. These firms license their technology to chip design companies for huge sums. But that could soon change. RISC-V International, a non-profit born from the work of a team of computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, and now based in Geneva, Switzerland, has developed an increasingly popular open source alternative to Arm and Intel’s designs, and Chinese companies are buying i