Alibaba optimizes Android 16 for RISC-V chips

Alibaba's Damo Academy research institution has optimized Android 16 for RISC-V chips.

Android 16.

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May 29, 2026 at 9:50 pm CEST

3 min. read

By

Andreas Floemer

Alibaba optimizes Android 16 for RISC-V chips

Developers at Damo Academy, a research institution of the Alibaba Group, have reportedly ported Android 16 (AOSP) to chips with the open-source instruction set architecture RISC-V.

Android 16 on RVA23

According to a post on the Chinese social network Weixin (WeChat), Damo Academy has successfully run Android 16 on XuanTie 9-series processors using the RVA23 instruction set profile. The researchers did not specify which model in the chip series was used. The 9-series includes processors with varying performance, from basic models to AI-optimized server processors.

In the post (via The Register), the Damo developers describe it as a milestone and "a new era in the RISC-V ecosystem," as well as a solid technical foundation for widespread commercial use. Damo Academy states that it has shared the development work with the first group of strategic XuanTie customers. They hope these customers will use it to accelerate research into new scenarios for RISC-V chips in end devices and significantly shorten development time to product launch.

The XuanTie platform is fully compatible with Android specifications such as Android Verified Boot (AVB), Generic Kernel Image (GKI), Generic System Image (GSI), and Vendor Interface (VINTF) in terms of its system capabilities, the report continues. Furthermore, the platform has proven the stability of the Android 16 runtime environment, system services, and native RISC-V applications on the XuanTie processor in tests, according to Damo.

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Progress in RISC-V

This is not the first Android version to be run on RISC-V chips. The first was Android 10 in 2021. At that time, a dual-core XuanTie C910 from Alibaba subsidiary T-Head was used as the processor. An advantage over ARM chips is that the RISC-V architecture is not subject to patents and is available under the BSD license.

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Development board with the RVA23-compatible RISC-V SoC SpacemiT K3.

RISC-V single-board computer with RVA23 chip for new Linux distributions

RISC-V is playing an increasingly important role, especially in the Chinese market, as it allows companies to be more independent of Western manufacturers like Qualcomm and trade restrictions. Interestingly, Qualcomm has also been researching the RISC-V chip architecture together with Bosch, Infineon, Nordic Semiconductor, and NXP.

Google Supports RISC-V (A Little)

For Google, the open RISC-V architecture is also not new territory: the company is actively working on porting Android to the open instruction set architecture, possibly to reduce its dependence on ARM. However, since Google manager Lars Bergstrom emphasized in 2023 that the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) was investing significant effort in supporting RISC-V chips, little has materialized.

Furthermore, in 2024, Google removed some specific kernel support from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) here, but Google emphasizes that the project will continue. The goal is to establish RISC-V as a first-class platform for future Android devices.