Cambricon posts 108% surge in revenue amid China’s massive AI chip drive

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant Cambricon Technologies reported a 108 per cent surge in first-half revenue on Friday, as the firm capitalises on a massive domestic push to replace foreign AI hardware. The chipmaker’s revenue for the first six months of the year reached 6 billion yuan (US$890 million), while profits also jumped 122.6 per cent year on year to 2.3 billion yuan, according to a stock exchange filing. In the second quarter, the firm’s revenue was 3.1 billion yuan, in line with the consensus estimate of 3 billion yuan predicted by a Bloomberg poll. Net profit reached 1.3 billion yuan, up from 1 billion yuan during the previous quarter. The company attributed the revenue surge to a steady increase in demand for AI computing power during the first six months. “Leveraging our core competitiveness in AI chips, we continued to strengthen in-depth cooperation with leading enterprises in the finance and internet sectors,” it said in the filing. The earnings jump underscores the broader boom in China’s AI chip sector, fuelled by Beijing’s sweeping push for tech self-sufficiency as well as a monumental AI infrastructure buildout across the nation. With US export controls largely cutting off China’s access to advanced AI accelerators from companies like Nvidia, domestic designers are rushing to fill the market vacuum. Cambricon’s Shanghai-listed stock closed up 2.7 per cent at nearly 1,200 yuan ahead of the earnings release on Friday. The company was the most valuable stock on Shanghai’s tech-focused STAR market until July, when it was overtaken by memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) following its blockbuster market debut. Cambricon has previously outlined ambitious plans to dramatically scale its operations. In July, the company set a target of generating more than 100 billion yuan in revenue over the three years to 2028 – a nearly 20-fold increase from its previous plan set three years earlier, which aimed for 4.6 billion yuan of cumulative revenue between 2024 and 2026. The higher target was set as part of the firm’s roll-out of a new staff stock incentive plan. The momentum lifting Cambricon is also rippling across the rest of the domestic AI chip sector. Beijing-based Moore Threads expected its first-half revenue to rise up to 149 per cent year on year to 1.75 billion yuan, citing strong demand for its MTT S5000 graphics processing unit and rapid commercialisation of its intelligent computing clusters. Hygon Information Technology, another leader in the domestic AI processor sector, forecast first-half revenue of up to 9.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 70 per cent. Still, analysts expect Cambricon to face mounting challenges amid fierce domestic competition. “Competition is likely to intensify as peers launch new products in second half of 2026, testing Cambricon’s relative performance and price-to-performance positioning,” Morgan Stanley analysts said in a research note last week. In the filing, Cambricon said it was developing a next-generation intelligent processor microarchitecture and instruction set – though it did not disclose a launch date – as well as optimising systems on the software side.