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Chinese AI chipmaker Cambricon Technologies, often dubbed “China’s Nvidia,” reported an extraordinary 14-fold revenue increase in its latest quarter, marking one of the strongest performances in the country’s semiconductor sector this year. Quarterly revenue jumped to about 1.73 billion yuan (roughly $240 million), with profits reaching 567 million yuan, reversing last year’s loss. The surge came as China accelerated efforts to replace foreign AI processors amid U.S. export restrictions on Nvidia’s high-end GPUs.
Following the results, Cambricon’s stock price soared nearly 15 percent, propelling the firm’s valuation and catapulting CEO Chen Tianshi into the ranks of the world’s richest individuals. His net worth reportedly climbed to around $24 billion, reflecting the country’s growing enthusiasm for homegrown AI hardware.
Cambricon designs AI accelerators for cloud computing, edge devices, and data centers—key areas of China’s push for technological self-sufficiency. While investors view the company as a national champion, analysts warn that its valuation, now exceeding 100 times sales, may not be sustainable. Despite the spectacular quarter, Cambricon still trails far behind Nvidia in global market share and advanced process technology. Whether the company can translate this momentum into long-term competitiveness remains the central question.
How is the US-China chip embargo going? China consumes an estimated 45% of the worlds semiconductors, revenue which is now being lost to China chip companies who make good enough chips. Politics!
How is the US-China chip embargo going? China consumes an estimated 45% of the worlds semiconductors, revenue which is now being lost to China chip companies who make good enough chips. Politics!
Cambricon has been designing AI accelerators for longer than Huawei's HiSilicon. It is said their products have better software support. They took a hit from not being able to fab in Western foundries but now that they moved chip production elsewhere, supposedly SMIC, they are back to sales and growth.
As for the overall chip situation in China, last I checked the average unit price of exported Chinese chips is similar to that of imported ones. Which is not what one would expect.
Many Chinese firms stockpiled chips ahead of the planned roll-out of more expansive and stringent trade sanctions by Washington.
www.scmp.com
How much of this is due to chip re-exports I do not know. It might be legacy node chips just have that much heft in the market it dillutes the whole thing.
China's AI chip exports are currently growing quite quickly.
"On the evening of August 26, Cambricon released its semiannual report, revealing a 2025 first-half operating revenue of 2.881 billion yuan, a year-over-year increase of 4,347.82%—a growth rate rarely seen in China's A-share market."
Now,$400M for half a year isn't bad at all, probably enough to put them in the top 25 IC houses, maybe even top 10.
But, that was 43x growth, meaning for the first half of 2024, they "raked" in $10M!
How possibly can they have better software support if they were doing $20M a year (annualized)?
It is rather obvious. Cambricon's sales revenues collapsed after being put in the Entity List in 15 December 2022, losing access to the Western foundries where their product was made, and now they are clawing their way back.
US AI vendors leaving the Chinese market also probably helped.
I heard claims that Cambricon's hardware and software supports DeepSeek LLM better than Huawei's solution for example. Because of lack of hardware support for some functions, and poorly developed software the Huawei Ascend series has issues in training of DeepSeek models, although they got it working for inference.
