Chinese chip designer Loongson claims more than 100 products now run on its homegrown LoongArch architecture, including an OpenStack-based cloud stack from domestic hyperscale heavyweight Inspur.
Loongson’s LoongArch is a proprietary instruction set architecture developed to cut reliance on foreign tech, which is mostly a blend of MIPS and RISC-V. The Chinese chip shop has deployed the ISA in processors powering industrial gear, desktops, and servers. Loongson’s silicon is still trailing behind the performance of top-tier x86 and Arm processors, but the gap is closing.
China last year advised local companies to buy chips designed and made by local companies because products from elsewhere are “no longer secure and reliable.” Beijing’s latest list of verified secure processors again omits AMD and Intel products, but includes local processors, including two from Loongson.
That’s all well and good for Loongson, but even the most flag-waving user won’t touch a chip that can’t run the software they need. This is why the biz periodically publishes compatibility lists showing what already works on LoongArch, and what’s supposedly coming soon.
A previous edition of that list included Lenovo’s hyperconverged stack. The April 2025 update added Inspur’s Cloud Operating System.
Inspur is a Chinese server maker and cloud infrastructure provider whose clientele has included domestic hyperscalers such as Alibaba and Tencent. The outfit landed on Washington’s Entity List in 2023, effectively barring most American tech vendors from supplying it without a license. Even so, Inspur continues to serve a sizeable Chinese customer base, offering both hardware and its InCloud OS stack for IaaS and PaaS deployments – a platform built on OpenStack.
InCloud OS on LoongArch therefore positions Loongson as a potential player in China’s hyperscale market, especially if it can deliver the 64-core processor and matching dual-socket server design it recently teased.
Loongson faces competition at home, as Alibaba and Huawei already have their own server processors and cloudy stacks, but both use the Arm architecture.
China is also adept at promoting its tech companies around the world and is using the current trade war with the USA to position itself as a reliable partner. Loongson could benefit from that, too. ®
