The open-standard RISC-V instruction set architecture has evolved from an academic project into a legitimate disruptor, increasingly embedded across a diverse range of compute platforms. Amid a wave of industry consolidation, geopolitical shifts, and an AI-driven workload explosion, RISC-V is accelerating toward mainstream relevance with some of the largest chip players backing it. A strong ISA needs a strong ecosystem, and RISC-V is seeing meaningful support across all levels of the stack. Android is being ported to RISC-V, with full RVA23 compliance under development. Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux are already available on SiFive hardware, giving software developers familiar toolchains. Tenstorrent, a new AI chip start-up co-founded by legendary chip architect Jim Keller, and also a SiFive customer, is designing RISC-V-based CPUs targeting AI and high-performance edge workloads. Meanwhile, Ahead Computing, another RISC-V start-up with ties to Intel talent, is quietly making strides in server-class designs. Finally, all of the “Magnificent Seven” tech giants reportedly use RISC-V in some capacity, with five of them working directly with SiFive (and likely others). These include datacenter service processors, AI accelerators, and custom embedded cores—proof that RISC-V’s flexibility fits many application use cases. What makes RISC-V different isn’t just the open license, it’s the ability to tailor the architecture to the application. Unlike x86 or Arm, which impose fixed instruction sets and licensing constraints, RISC-V lets chipmakers design exactly what they need, nothing more, nothing less. That’s a major win in the AI era, where model diversity and workload complexity demand hardware tuned for domain specific workloads and energy efficiency. In the US, DoD-aligned programs are increasingly turning to open ISAs to avoid reliance on foreign-controlled IP. Even GlobalFoundries’ acquisition of MIPS plays into the RISC-V narrative, expanding IP offerings while avoiding competitive overlap.