Open-source chips gain ground in data centers

Servers built on the open RISC-V instruction set tripled their data-center footprint over the past year, according to industry tracking data published on Wednesday, marking the architecture's first meaningful share in general-purpose computing.

Two hyperscale operators confirmed production deployments for storage and networking workloads, citing licensing flexibility and supply-chain diversification. Custom accelerators remain the larger use case, but general-purpose cores are closing the software gap as major Linux distributions reach parity support.

Analysts caution the absolute numbers remain small — under 2 percent of new server shipments — but note that ARM's data-center climb began from a similar base a decade ago.