Tencent's Chip Chief, Jianlin Gao, Resigns to Start His Own Business, Aiming at the RISC-V High-Performance AI CPU Field

BlockBeats News, August 22, according to MaxForAI, Tencent's core chip development leader, Gao Jianlin, has recently left Tencent to start his own business. He plans to focus on high-performance AI servers and Agentic AI, developing a high-performance CPU based on the RISC-V architecture.

Gao Jianlin is considered one of the early key drivers of Tencent's self-developed chip ecosystem. Records show that he founded the FPGA hardware team within Tencent in 2013, started AI chip development in 2018, established the Penglai Lab in 2020, and promoted the development and data center deployment of multiple AI chips at Tencent.

This entrepreneurial direction focuses on CPU, rather than the currently competitive AI GPU market. Reports indicate that Gao Jianlin believes that with the rapid development of Agentic AI, the AI inference process will involve model invocation, tool execution, search, database interaction, and a large number of task scheduling. The CPU will play a more important role in scheduling and control in the AI system.

According to reports, Gao Jianlin was previously involved in RISC-V-related research and development at Tencent, participating in chip architecture, validation, backend, and other technical directions. His new company plans to build a high-performance server CPU based on the open instruction set RISC-V to enter the AI infrastructure market.

Currently, Gao Jianlin's new company name, financing status, and specific product release date have not been disclosed. The market is watching to see if it will become another emerging force in the Chinese AI chip field targeting server CPUs and intelligent infrastructure.