Cambricon First-Half Revenue Rises 108% As China Pushes AI Chips
SCMP covered Cambricon's first-half filing, which showed 6 billion yuan in revenue, higher profit and a larger three-year target as China's AI chip designers chase domestic demand.
Cambricon Technologies doubled first-half revenue and grew profit even faster, giving China’s domestic AI-chip buildout a clear earnings marker as buyers look for local alternatives to foreign accelerators, SCMP reported from the company’s Friday stock exchange filing.
Revenue rose 108 per cent year on year to 6 billion yuan, or US$890 million, in the first six months.
Net profit increased 122.6 per cent to 2.3 billion yuan.
The second quarter kept the chipmaker close to market expectations.
Revenue reached 3.1 billion yuan, broadly in line with the 3 billion yuan consensus estimate in a Bloomberg poll.
Net profit was 1.3 billion yuan, up from 1 billion yuan in the previous quarter.
Cambricon attributed the jump to steady growth in demand for AI computing power during the first half.
“Leveraging our core competitiveness in AI chips, we continued to strengthen in-depth cooperation with leading enterprises in the finance and internet sectors,” the company said in the filing.
The numbers landed in a market being reshaped by Beijing’s technology self-sufficiency campaign and a large AI infrastructure buildout.
US export controls have sharply limited Chinese access to advanced AI accelerators from companies such as Nvidia, leaving domestic chip designers to compete for projects and enterprise deployments that previously would have relied on foreign hardware.
Investors had already marked up Cambricon before the earnings release.
Its Shanghai-listed shares closed 2.7 per cent higher at nearly 1,200 yuan on Friday.
The company had been the most valuable stock on Shanghai’s tech-focused STAR Market until July, when memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT, overtook it after a major market debut.
Cambricon has also set a much larger target for its next phase of growth.
In July, the company aimed to generate more than 100 billion yuan in revenue over the three years to 2028 as part of a new staff stock incentive plan.
That was nearly 20 times its previous plan, set three years earlier, which called for 4.6 billion yuan in cumulative revenue between 2024 and 2026.
The same demand pull is showing up elsewhere in China’s AI-chip sector.
Beijing-based Moore Threads expected first-half revenue to rise by as much as 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 intelligent computing clusters.
Hygon Information Technology forecast first-half revenue of up to 9.3 billion yuan, a 70 per cent year-on-year increase.
That expansion is making Cambricon’s market more crowded.
Morgan Stanley analysts said in a research note last week that peers launching new products in the second half of 2026 would likely intensify competition and test Cambricon’s relative performance and price-to-performance positioning.
Cambricon is working on a next-generation intelligent processor microarchitecture and instruction set, while also optimising systems on the software side.
The filing did not disclose a launch date.
