Zero ASIC ran a count of GitHub stars on public, non-fork chip design repositories, grouped by company. The data was collected October 11, 2026. The company says it ranked first in the world, roughly 100 times the next company and about 4,900 times NVIDIA.

The post also normalizes stars by headcount, and checks the 320 companies listed in Awesome Semiconductor Startups. Bluespec stands out there. It open sourced its BSC compiler and publishes a family of RISC-V cores, enough to place fourth overall, just behind AMD. After that the numbers fall off fast.

Most of the startup list has no chip design repositories at all. That includes well funded AI chip companies such as Groq, Etched, SambaNova, d-Matrix, Lightmatter, Ayar Labs, Axelera, SiMa.ai, Rebellions and Furiosa, whose public repositories are SDKs, model zoos and inference examples.

The Zero ASIC total includes work going back to Adapteva and Parallella.…