Cambricon Technologies Corp. swung to a record profit in the first half, reflecting a wave of demand for Chinese chips after Beijing encouraged the use of homegrown technology in a post-DeepSeek AI boom.
The Chinese AI chip designer, which competes with Huawei Technologies Co. to provide accelerators for developing and hosting AI models, posted a 1.03 billion yuan profit ($144 million) versus a year-earlier loss of 533 million yuan. That’s off a roughly 44-fold surge in revenue to 2.9 billion yuan. Its shares climbed more than 8% in Shanghai.
“Amid U.S. restrictions on China’s AI sector, government support for leading domestic firms is essential to drive growth and replace imported chips,” said Ma Cheng, chairman of Shenzhen Juze Investment Management Co. “Such protection is necessary, and Cambricon’s growth is far from temporary.”
Despite the strong results, Cambricon acknowledged intensifying competition in the AI chip sector, with only Nvidia maintaining an absolute advantage in the market. That’s as the US government allows Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. to resume sales of certain lower-end chips to the country.
