French data center and cloud provider Scaleway has launched what it claims are the first RISC-V servers available on the cloud.
Unveiled last week, the new EM-RV1 instance type is powered by Alibaba's T-Head C910 RISC-V system-on-chip (SoC) and includes 16GB of LPDDR (Low-Power Double Data Rate) RAM and 128GB of eMMC storage for the price of €15.99 ($17.34) a month.
The EM-RV1 servers also contain a C910 RV64GCV RISC-V CPU, a 100 Mb/s ethernet network card, and an average power consumption of 1.3W per 1.85 GHz core. The instances will run Ubuntu, Debian, and Alpine Linux.
According to Scaleway, a 52U rack can hold up to 672 EM-RV1 instances.
RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture based on established RISC principles, which is provided under open source licenses that do not require fees. In a statement, the company said RISC-V will become the dominant architecture as countries “seek to regain sovereignty over semiconductor production.”
T-Head, the chip unit of Alibaba, debuted its 64-bit high-performance XuanTie C910 processor in 2021.
Sébastien Luttringer, R&D director at Scaleway added: "The launch of RISC-V servers is a concrete and direct statement by Scaleway to boost an ecosystem where technological sovereignty is open to all, from the lowest level upwards. This bold, visionary initiative in an emerging market opens up new prospects for all players.”
Iliad-owned Scaleway operates out of four owned data centers across Paris totaling around 44MW, and offers cloud services from facilities in Warsaw and Amsterdam. The data centers were recently spun out into a new company known as OpCore.
In 2023, Scaleway retrofitted around 14,000 of its servers, removing the physical RAID controllers and replacing them with software-based RAID, in order to extend their lifespan by up to 10 years.
