Chips & Export Controls

Biren’s first interim report as a listed company showed 1.2355 billion yuan of half-year revenue, up 1,997.6 percent, with a net loss 76.4 percent narrower than a year earlier. The number that decides the story is the float. Moore Threads carries 250.94 billion yuan of market value on 6.43 percent of its shares actually trading, and MetaX 270.03 billion yuan on 4.63 percent. Two Shanghai listings hold 520.97 billion yuan of combined market value, about 77.4 billion dollars, priced each day by 28.6 billion yuan of tradable stock. Biren, listed in Hong Kong with just over half its shares in public hands, trades at about 71 times half-year revenue against Moore Threads at about 144.

Profits at China’s large industrial enterprises rose 17.6 percent across January to July, and AI-related electronics accounted for 9.3 percentage points of that, more than half of all the profit growth Chinese industry produced this year. July on its own grew 11.2 percent, down 3.9 points from June, so the headline is decelerating while the electronics contribution holds. The same fact reads from the bottom up in the interim reports filed that morning: SMIC’s first-half net profit rose 94.2 percent on revenue up 19.4 percent, profit growing about five times faster than sales, with the extra coming from price rather than volume.

Loongson chairman Hu Weiwu told the company’s 25th-anniversary meeting in Beijing on 19 August that its taped-out 3B6600 processor runs on a 1Xnm domestic process and performs at the level of mainstream x86 CPUs built on 7nm or better. The claim is Loongson’s own, made at Loongson’s own event, with no independent benchmark published and no workload named. Its audited filings show FY2025 revenue of 635.3 million yuan, about 89 million dollars, against a 455.1 million yuan net loss attributable to shareholders, a third straight nine-figure annual loss. Hu said the main contradiction has moved from research to sales, and that 2025 to 2027 is a transition from the policy market to the open market.

China switched on its first fully domestic 100,000-chip AI supercluster, and the National Development and Reform Commission confirmed it is running at the Zhengzhou node of the national compute grid. Sugon’s 8000, nicknamed Dengfeng, is Chinese at every layer, the accelerators, the interconnect and the immersion cooling, with no restricted imports; the honest caveats are that its workload today leans on double-precision science rather than model training and that per chip it still trails Nvidia on raw performance and the CUDA stack.

Cambricon, the designer of China’s most advanced homegrown AI chips, reported it earned more in the first half of 2026 than in all of 2025: revenue of about 5.99 billion yuan (up 108 percent) and net profit of about 2.31 billion yuan (up 123 percent), against a full-year 2025 net profit near 2.06 billion yuan. Chinese buyers will take every accelerator it can design; how many China can actually manufacture, at what node and with whose memory, is the fabless ceiling that remains.

DeepSeek finished shipping V4, and its day-0 domestic-chip support runs on Huawei Ascend (via Huawei’s CANN, its answer to Nvidia’s CUDA), Cambricon and Hygon. After the launch Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent ordered hundreds of thousands of Ascend 950 processors.

On Nvidia’s earnings call, Jensen Huang said the quiet part out loud: China revenue is essentially zero, and the company has "largely conceded" the market to Huawei.

The full Nvidia-to-China chip sequence, from the A800 and H800 to the H20 halt and a 4.5 billion dollar write-off, one of the largest write-downs in semiconductor history.

Washington cleared the H200 for ten Chinese firms with a 25%-of-revenue condition. Beijing told them not to buy, keeping the money pointed at domestic chips. Deliveries stayed at zero.

China’s national computing hub in Zhengzhou runs 60,000 accelerators made by Sugon, a firm tied to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with zero chips from Nvidia, AMD or any Western supplier.

A Chinese system topped the global TOP500 at 2.198 exaflops on 47,000 domestic CPUs and zero GPUs. On the AI-relevant benchmark, it came fourth. The asterisk is the whole export-control story.

A teardown found part of DeepSeek V4’s architecture was co-designed for Huawei’s Ascend 950DT inference chip. The model and the silicon are now being built for each other.

Cambricon became China’s first pure-play AI chip designer worth over a trillion yuan. The same report shows the distance left: a 2.9% share of the cards China bought in 2025, against Nvidia’s 55%.

A Chinese memory middleman’s half-year profit jumped 743x. AI’s appetite for HBM is being paid for one layer down, by the budget phone in your pocket.