The architecture with no landlord
So who owns RISC-V? The honest answer is nobody owns the instruction set, and for anyone buying or building IoT hardware, that is the single most useful thing about it. Here is who actually steers the standard, who holds the trademark, and why none of them can charge you rent.
The short answer
Ownership is the wrong word, and that is not pedantry. For decades the two instruction sets that mattered each had an owner. x86 belongs to Intel and AMD. Arm belongs to Arm Holdings. You build on either one on their terms, on their roadmap, at their price, and if they change their mind you find out afterwards. RISC-V broke that pattern by having nothing to own. The specification is open and royalty-free. There is no company you pay to use it and no company that can revoke your right to.
For an IoT team that is not a philosophical nicety, it is a supply-chain fact. The chip you design around this year cannot be licensed out from under you, discontinued at a licensor’s convenience, or repriced when your volume finally gets interesting. The architecture has no landlord, so nobody can serve notice.
Nobody owns RISC-V the way Intel owns x86. What exists instead is a non-profit that stewards the standard and holds the trademark. The ISA underneath it is free for anyone, anywhere, to implement.
Where it came from, and who let go of it
RISC-V started as a summer project at UC Berkeley in 2010. The name is a Roman five, the fifth RISC design out of Berkeley after RISC-I, RISC-II, SOAR and SPUR. The team wanted a clean teaching and research instruction set, and crucially they put no patents on the specification itself. That last decision is the reason this post exists. Berkeley could have owned RISC-V. It chose not to, and handed the ecosystem the open standard it had spent thirty years waiting for. If you want the plain-English version of what an ISA even is, that is What Is RISC-V? A Beginner’s Guide.
By 2015 the thing needed adult supervision, so the RISC-V Foundation was set up as a member-controlled non-profit to shepherd the specification. Not to own it in any lock-and-key sense, but to ratify extensions, run the working groups, and stop the standard fragmenting into a dozen incompatible dialects. That is the job that actually matters, and it is a governance job, not an ownership one.
RISC-V International: steward, not owner
The Foundation became RISC-V International, and in March 2020 it reincorporated in Switzerland as the RISC-V International Association. It runs on a member model: thousands of organisations across seventy-odd countries, from chip giants to universities to one-person startups, all with a seat at the table and a hand on the specification. In 2018 it entered a collaboration with the Linux Foundation, which provides the operational scaffolding, legal, marketing, infrastructure, training, so the association can get on with the technical work.
The comparison writes itself. This is the Linux model applied to silicon. No single vendor sets the direction, the members do, by committee, in the open.
| Architecture | Who owns the ISA | What you pay to use it | Who steers the roadmap |
|---|---|---|---|
| x86 | Intel and AMD | Effectively closed, cross-licensed between two firms | Intel and AMD |
| Arm | Arm Holdings | Licence fee plus per-chip royalty | Arm |
| RISC-V | No one owns the ISA | Nothing, royalty-free | Members, through RISC-V International |
Look at the right-hand column from the seat of someone specifying a sensor node or an edge gateway. The roadmap for your architecture is set by a body you can join, not by a vendor you can only negotiate with. That is a different relationship with your own supply chain.
The one thing that is owned: the name
There is exactly one piece of RISC-V that has an owner, and it is the trademark. “RISC-V” is a registered trade mark of RISC-V International. The specification is free for anyone to implement, but you cannot slap the RISC-V name and logo on a commercial product or a domain and imply endorsement unless you are playing by the trademark guidelines. Open ISA, protected name. The two are not in tension, they are the mechanism: the openness keeps the technology free, the trademark keeps the label meaningful.
This is also why this series lives on IoT Portal rather than on a bare RISC-V domain. The ISA is free to build on. The name is not free to trade on. Keeping them straight is exactly what RISC-V International exists to do.
Why Switzerland, and why an IoT team should care
The move to Zurich was not for the mountains. Sitting outside direct US or UK jurisdiction is a deliberate neutrality play, and it matters more the more geopolitical the chip business gets. An open standard governed from a neutral base is a standard that is harder to weaponise through export policy. For anyone shipping connected hardware into multiple markets, that neutrality is a quiet form of insurance: the architecture you standardised on is less likely to become collateral in someone else’s trade dispute.
That geopolitical angle is a whole story in its own right, and it runs through the back end of this series. For now the takeaway is narrower and more practical. The governance is neutral, member-driven and open, which is precisely what makes the next question worth asking honestly rather than as marketing: is it really open source? That is Is RISC-V Really Open Source?, and the answer has more nuance than the brochures admit.
The governance map
Fifteen years, three custodians, one specification that stayed open the whole way through.
So who owns RISC-V? The buyer’s version
Strip out the corporate history and the answer an IoT decision-maker actually needs is this. The instruction set is owned by no one and stewarded by a neutral non-profit you can join. The name is owned by that non-profit and protected. The silicon that implements it is owned by whichever vendor built it, and there are many of them, competing, which is exactly the second-sourcing leverage a proprietary architecture never gives you.
That is the difference between renting your foundation and owning your options. For a category defined by long deployment lifecycles and thin margins, connected and edge hardware, it is close to the whole argument. The wider case for why that lands in IoT first sits in the series hub, the RISC-V cornerstone.
Last updated 6 August 2026. Sources: RISC-V origin (UC Berkeley, 2010) and governance history per RISC-V International; RISC-V Foundation founded 2015, Linux Foundation collaboration announced November 2018, reincorporated as RISC-V International Association in Switzerland March 2020; “RISC-V” registered trade mark of RISC-V International (US reg. no. 5259394).
