Tencent chip lead Gao Jianlin leaves to start a RISC-V AI CPU venture

BlockBeats reported on August 22, citing MaxForAI, that Gao Jianlin, Tencent’s core chip R&D lead, has left the company and started a venture of his own. The startup plans to develop a high-performance CPU based on the RISC-V architecture, with a focus on high-performance AI servers and Agentic AI, or agentic AI. The move points away from the crowded AI GPU market and toward CPUs for AI infrastructure. According to the report, Gao believes that as Agentic AI develops quickly, inference workflows will involve model calls, tool execution, search, database interaction and heavy task scheduling. In that setup, CPUs will take on a more important role in orchestration and control. Gao is described as one of the early key drivers behind Tencent’s in-house chip efforts. He built an FPGA hardware team inside Tencent in 2013, began working on AI chips in 2018, and founded Penglai Lab in 2020. He also helped push multiple Tencent AI chips into development and data-center deployment. The report says Gao had previously worked on RISC-V-related efforts at Tencent and was involved in chip architecture, verification and backend work. His new company plans to use the open instruction set to build a high-performance server CPU for the AI infrastructure market. The company’s name, fundraising status and product launch timeline have not been disclosed.