Skip to Content

Chinese Government to Purchase Stake in U.S. Semiconductor Firm

The investment would represent China’s first ownership stake in the firm behind part of its home-grown Loongson processor.

Chinese language news sources are reporting that the Institute of Computing Technologies of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is considering plans to buy a 20% stake in MIPS technologies, the California-based semiconductor IP development firm founded more than 20 years ago by John Hennessy, who is now president of Stanford University.

The sale is significant for two reasons. The first is that MIPS is a storied company, whose original chip designs, while now used primarily in embedded devices, once powered everything from desktops to supercomputers, and are still used as teaching platforms in many electrical engineering programs. The second, more important reason this sale matters is that China’s home-grown Loongson processor runs an extended version of the MIPS architecture, and the Institute of Computing Technologies (ICT) has a full architecture license that allows its engineers to both build MIPS-powered chips and to extend the architecture itself with new instructions. This has allowed the ICT to develop successively faster generations of Loongson processors, from the first prototype to the Loongson 2F, which is currently available in netbooks and low-power desktops from Chinese manufacturer Lemote. The third generation of the Loongson processor might even be fast enough to allow China to build the world’s fastest supercomputer using Loongson Chips.

ICT is following in the footsteps of countless tech companies before it (e.g. Apple and Imagination Technologies) by acquiring a stake in a company that makes intellectual property that is essential to its products. MIPS has so far declined to comment on this potential acquisition.

MIPS is a small company and does not manufacture chips. Instead, like its competitor ARM, MIPS maintains, enhances, and licenses the existing MIPS architecture. If I’m reading its quarterly reports correctly, it has a market capitalization well south of $100 million, which means that acquiring a 20% stake in it would be trivial for the cash-rich Chinese government, though perhaps quite significant for the ICT and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which no doubt have their own budgets.

MIPS’ architecture has long been the only portion of the IP behind the Loongson processor that wasn’t entirely invented and controlled by organizations within China–potentially a sore point for government backers of a processor that seems to be as much about national pride as advancements in the field of semiconductors. By buying a piece of MIPS, the ICT has taken a small step toward addressing that issue.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.