2025-11-18 –, Main Room
Geopolitical competition over technologies and their underlying infrastructures has intensified in recent years, yet its impact on international collaboration in open technology ecosystems remains under-examined. As governments increasingly frame technological capabilities as matters of digital sovereignty, do geopolitical tensions strengthen or fragment participation in such ecosystems as governments and/or enterprises seek alternatives to proprietary systems controlled by geopolitical rivals? This article examines this question through an exploratory case study on RISC-V, a royalty-free Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that emerged as an academic project at UC Berkeley focused on building an alternative to proprietary processor designs. Now hosted by the RISC-V Foundation under the Linux Foundation, RISC-V has become a strategically significant open standard for governments and industry alike, as demand grows for specialized processors in AI, IoT, and high-performance computing. Both China and the EU are investing in RISC-V architectures as part of their industrial strategies, while US Congress members have raised concerns over Chinese involvement in RISC-V. Using a multilevel framework, this article investigates whether and how key geopolitical events and tensions have affected RISC-V's governance structures (meso level) and contributors’ incentives and behaviors (micro level). It employs a mixed-methods approach, combining (1) desk research of governance changes; (2) a quantitative analysis of the relationship between contribution patterns and both governance and geopolitical developments; and (3) semi-structured interviews with RISC-V Foundation staff and contributors from the US, China, and the EU. This analysis makes both empirical and practical contributions to discussions about the strategic significance of open standards in an era of intensifying geopolitical competition in technologies and their underlying infrastructures. Initial findings suggest that polycentric governance strategies – such as RISC-V's relocation to Switzerland – may buffer against politicization and restrictions on technological cooperation.
This article examines how geopolitical tensions have shaped the emergence and stabilization of RISC-V, an open and royalty-free Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that has rapidly expanded in the global semiconductor industry. Rather than treating geopolitics as an external constraint acting upon standardization, the study analyzes how geopolitical rivalry has actively contributed to RISC-V’s development. The analysis combines Science and Technology Studies approaches with Ostrom’s framework for commons-based governance to trace both the strategies of alignment of heterogeneous actors and the institutional arrangements devised to maintain cooperation. Drawing on document analysis, historical membership data, and interviews with key contributors, the study shows how RISC-V became articulated to divergent political projects: frontier innovation in the United States; technological autonomy in China; and digital sovereignty agendas in Europe. These agendas, while often contradictory, converged around RISC-V’s value as an open foundation for processor design. At the same time, this convergence generated risks of fragmentation along political, economic, and technical lines. The RISC-V Foundation responded by relocating to Switzerland to ensure geopolitical neutrality, progressively formalising rules of participation, restructuring membership and voting rights, and establishing transparent procedures for technical collaboration. These governance reforms produced better representation, reflected in the diversification of membership and board composition across the United States, China, and Europe between 2015 and 2025. The case of RISC-V demonstrates how open technological ecosystems can operate as stabilizing infrastructures under geopolitical tension, while also remaining vulnerable to capture and strategic instrumentalization.
Jan Krewer is a doctoral student at the Centre of Economics of the Sorbonne Paris North University. Jan’s research is financed by the National Association for Research in Technology (ANRT) under an Industrial Agreement for Research Training with the French development agency – the “Agence française de Développement” (AFD) Group. His work contributes to AFD’s multidisciplinary research department on commons and sustainable development.
Jan holds a master’s degree in international public management from Sciences Po Paris, where he studied political sciences. He previously served as an analyst and Deputy Secretary-General of the French Digital Council, contributing to the initial development of the Law for a Digital Republic. Jan lived in Senegal and Rwanda, where he joined the Smart Africa Alliance as a strategic advisor to work on pan-African data governance and the federation of digital identities. Most recently, he worked as a Senior Policy Analyst at Open Future, helping to develop a European strategic agenda for digital commons as part of the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Commons project. Jan Krewer’s research focuses on forms of collective ownership of technologies and their potential for the development of societies.