China is developing a system firmware standard from the ground up that will, in the future, replace UEFI and old-school BIOS in digital devices, called UBIOS. The name "UBIOS" is straightforward—it simply means Unified Basic Input Output System, and incorporates all the hardware support advancements UEFI brought to computing. The idea behind UBIOS is to decouple with predominantly Western-developed firmware standards, particularly Western firmware-level security architectures and roots of trust. The UBIOS standard has been drafted by thirteen Chinese tech companies, including Huawei, Byosoft, and Kunlun Tech, with oversight from CESI (China Electronics Standardization Institute).

The UBIOS standard has awareness for all contemporary hardware standards, including chiplets and heterogeneous computing. It also supports all modern machine architectures, including x86 (and x86-64), Arm, RISV-V, and LoongArch (MIPS-compatible). The firmware will be incorporated by Chinese computing and ICT giants designing everything from servers to client PCs, consumer electronics, network infrastructure, automobiles, and IoT appliances. China's indigenous Linux distributions will incorporate support for UBIOS. It remains to be seen if the UBIOS standard is made open to foreign firmware vendors such as Insyde, AMI, and Award.