Andes Technology — AI supply-chain exposure

Andes Technology is a Taiwanese licensor of processor design IP built on the open RISC-V instruction set. It does not make chips; it rents out CPU cores — increasingly its vector processors, which handle the wide, repetitive math that AI workloads lean on — for other designers to embed inside their own silicon. Those cores show up as building blocks within larger accelerators, including Meta's in-house MTIA parts, placing Andes deep in the design-IP layer of the chain.

Its structural hook is royalty leverage on a shift away from proprietary instruction sets: RISC-V gives chip designers a license-friendly alternative to Arm, and Andes is one of the more established vector-capable vendors riding that opening. But it sits as a component of a component — an ingredient inside someone else's accelerator rather than the accelerator itself — which is why the model reads its centrality as modest despite the marquee design wins.