Andes has slowed development of Cuzco, its high-end RISC-V CPU design for data centers, and shifted engineering resources toward AI work. In an interview published November 2, CTO Charlie Su said Andes still intends to turn the project into a product, possibly under another name. He gave no launch date.
Why Andes slowed Cuzco
Cuzco was introduced at Hot Chips 2025. Su told EE Times that inquiries about the project were slow to turn into licenses. Andes had brought Cuzco back in-house from its Condor spinout earlier in 2026, and Su said the company was moving more engineering effort to work with nearer-term revenue opportunities.
CPU intellectual property, or IP, is a processor design that other companies can license for use in their chips. Su said Andes’s AI business accounts for half of company revenue, grew 30% in 2025, and was likely to grow 50% in 2026. The 2026 figure was his forecast.
What Andes’s AI work involves
Andes CPU cores are used in AI chips for control, orchestration, and moving data, according to Su. He named Meta, d-Matrix, Fractile, and Axelera among the companies using them. That core-licensing work is separate from Andes’s deep-learning accelerator, which is described as delivering up to around 4 TOPS at 1 GHz and having its own compiler. The accelerator’s rating is not a specification for Cuzco.
Andes is also prioritizing a main processor core for storage. Su said 10 customers were already in production with the company’s smaller controller cores. He also identified automotive and robotics as areas of focus. In spring 2026, Andes used AI agents across engineering with human review, Su said.
