'World's first': AWS rival launches bare metal servers based on Chinese RISC-V CPU and costs only cents per hour to run — but will it live to regret using eMMC storage?

Scaleway Elastic Metal RV1 server.

European cloud provider Scaleway has launched the world's first range of RISC-V servers in the cloud, which it says is a “firm commitment to technological independence” in a market that is increasingly seeking sovereignty over semiconductor production.

RISC-V is a free and open instruction set architecture developed at the University of California at Berkeley that has the potential to revolutionize the semiconductor industry. Despite being a new architecture, RISC-V is already delivering high performance levels, making it a viable alternative to established architectures like x86 and ARM.