Alibaba's Open-Standard AI Chip Exposes the Blind Spot in Europe's China Sanctions Alibaba's DAMO Academy has built a 5nm RISC-V CPU that runs DeepSeek V3 at record single-core performance — and it was built entirely on an open standard that no one can sanction. European policymakers designed chip controls around proprietary architectures. That strategy just met its stress test. ## What happened in China Alibaba's DAMO Academy unveiled the XuanTie C950, a RISC-V CPU manufactured on a 5nm process that achieved over 70 points on the SPECint2006 benchmark — the highest single-core performance ever recorded for the RISC-V architecture, and the first RISC-V CPU to break the 70-point barrier in single-core SPECint2006. The chip has native support for billion-parameter large language models including Qwen3 and DeepSeek V3, making it a credible inference-capable processor rather than a research curiosity. This is not Alibaba's first move in this direction. The company…