The 2025 RISC-V Summit North America runs October 22–23 in Santa Clara, California, with a member day on October 21. If you are new to the ecosystem, this is your destination to see the breadth of activity, meet decision-makers, and understand how RISC-V can deliver positive change for your business.
What is RISC-V and why should you care?
RISC-V is an open standard computer processor instruction set architecture (ISA). In plain terms, it’s a common set of building blocks that any company can use to design chips that run everything from tiny sensors to powerful servers.
Unlike proprietary instruction sets that lock you to a single supplier’s roadmap and licensing model, RISC-V is open and customizable. That openness translates to real business value: freedom to tailor silicon to your products, freedom to choose your partners and suppliers from a highly capable ecosystem, and freedom to control your long-term compute roadmap.
Where RISC-V came from, and where it’s going
In the past 15 years, RISC-V has moved from a Berkeley, CA university research project to global adoption across industry. It now underpins billions of shipped cores, from tiny sensor devices to consumer computer components, right up to high performance computing (HPC). It’s currently attracting investment from major players across a range of markets including cloud, AI, automotive, embedded, and space.
Face-to-face with the Ecosystem
One of the biggest reasons to attend is the chance to meet RISC-V members, sponsors and exhibitors face to face, see live demos, hear them talk about their experiences with RISC-V and ask them specific questions relating to your own use cases.
The community spans a range of industries, with companies such as SiFive, Ventana Micro, Microchip, Andes Technology, Nuclei, Synopsys, Siemens, Arteris, Imagination, Qualcomm, SpacemiT, Deep Computing, Alibaba DAMO, TensTorrent, Rivos, lowRISC, Canonical, and Red Hat ready to show real solutions and share their experiences.
From what kinds of AI can run on specific RISC-V hardware to how you verify, profile, and debug processor designs with the right IP, tools, and distros, it will all be here to explore and discuss.
Business strategy: What RISC-V offers your business
- Accelerate and differentiate your product roadmap: With RISC-V, you’re not shipping the same off-the-shelf silicon as your competitors. The ISA is uniquely flexible, so your teams can add or select extensions that map to the workloads that matter to you. That level of fit drives better performance per watt, reduces your overall bill of materials, and creates defensible product differentiation that makes your product stand out.
- Reduce development burdens and cut costs: The open standard model draws on shared, pooled resources from a global community. Tooling, software stacks, and reference designs improve quickly and collectively, and are interrogated and tested by the global community. Your engineering spend goes further because you are not paying for duplicative proprietary licenses and won’t end up locked into one vendor’s release cycle.
- Reinforce your supply chain: RISC-V fosters resilient, competitive supply chains. You can source IP, tools, and silicon from a widening ecosystem across geographies and vendor sizes. That diversity helps you avoid single-supplier risk and respond faster to market shocks.
- Global resilience: We call this technology sovereignty: enabling countries and organizations around the world to solve local problems while accessing a global market. But it also has marked benefits for everyone: you set the roadmap for the silicon that underpins your products.
- Validate and de-risk with industry-evidenced success: RISC-V is no fringe science project. It is embraced across leading segments by household-name companies and an expansive membership community. You will find serious enterprise users at the Summit and in the expo hall, which is the fastest way to gauge ecosystem maturity for yourself.
Why RISC-V Summit is the fastest way to get smart about open hardware
You could read white papers for months, or you could spend two days getting hands-on briefings and live answers from the people building the future of compute. RISC-V Summit North America concentrates the entire value chain in one place: architects, software leaders, tool vendors, integrators, and end-product companies.
Our 2025 program includes keynotes, breakout sessions, a bustling exhibition hall and demo area, and separately ticketed developer workshops that run alongside the Summit – so your technical leaders can pick up practical skills while you handle strategic conversations.
At the summit, you can:
- Network and gain cross-sector insight: Meet peers across data center, AI, security, automotive, IoT, and edge. Many attendees are business leaders, not just engineers, which makes the quality of supplier and partnership conversations unusually high.
- Get ahead of the hype cycle: Gather competitive intelligence on AI acceleration, hardware-software co-design, and supply chain strategy, then brief your leadership team with concrete takeaways.
- Hear from leaders at Google, AWS, NASA and more: Keynotes and panels feature top voices from our ecosystem and beyond, offering both vision and near-term guidance about how they’re using RISC-V to drive innovation and lower risk/cost.
- Explore the exhibitor floor: Discover new tools, platforms, and vendors—and assess the maturity and breadth of the RISC-V ecosystem firsthand.
- Identify partnerships: Meet companies that may become a strategic asset for your company or investment portfolio.
- Get seen: Demonstrate to shareholders, partners, and media that your company is leaning into open innovation.
Technology Leadership: Recommended sessions
The bigger picture you’ll take home
Openness is reshaping compute, and how it’s utilized in every corner of industry. The ability to align silicon with your software, tune for your workloads, and source from multiple vendors reduces risk and unlocks new economics. Industry momentum continues to build across AI, automotive, and edge, with announcements and roadmaps you can validate in person at the Summit.
The result is a concrete plan to accelerate your product roadmap, cut development costs, harden your supply chain, and keep strategic control of the technology that defines your business.
Join us at RISC-V Summit North America 2025 to learn more about RISC-V hardware, software, systems, development tools, security and much more.
Spend two focused days learning how RISC-V converts open innovation into measurable business value, and leave with the connections and insight to make confident decisions. Registration is open now!
