US media: "China's small Nvidia", Hanwuji's breakthrough shows China's ambition in domestic GPU.

The semiconductor manufacturer Cambricon, headquartered in Beijing, China, has made a breakthrough and become the most valuable stock on the mainland stock market. This indicates a major shift in the Chinese capital market, with investors showing interest in AI chips rather than traditional industries such as alcohol.

DeepSeek's launch greatly boosted the enthusiasm

On August 25, 2025, Hanwuji's stock price surged 11.60%, reaching a new high of 1384.93 yuan. The market value reached 579.38 billion yuan (approximately 81 billion US dollars). Thus, it surpassed the well-known liquor manufacturer Kweichow Moutai, becoming the most expensive stock on the Chinese stock market.

The Cambricon stock listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange more than doubled in 2025, surging over 500% in the past 12 months. The current stock price is an astonishing 4554 times its historical price-to-earnings ratio.

This solid performance reflects the overwhelming confidence of analysts, with 13 out of 12 brokerage companies, including Goldman Sachs and Bernstein, giving "buy" recommendations.

Cambricon's rapid growth is called "China's small Nvidia," deeply intertwined with the Chinese government's active efforts to achieve technological self-sufficiency and the latest advances in domestic artificial intelligence models.

The artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek, headquartered in Hangzhou, China, announced that its latest models V3 and V3.1 are compatible with domestic chips, which greatly fueled this fervor. This development marks an important step forward for China in reducing its reliance on foreign suppliers such as Nvidia.

Su Lian Jye, chief analyst at the UK market research company Omdia, emphasized, "Cambricon is one of the few Chinese semiconductor companies committed to supporting FP8 scale products, which is the software format designated by DeepSeek for domestic chips.

Analysts such as Mo Wenyu from Cinda Securities believe that this signals a "software-hardware collaboration" phase, leading to a significant reduction in dependence on foreign computing power.

Even under US regulations, sales increased by 4,348%

The broader context is the tightening of US export controls on advanced semiconductors, accelerating the development of domestic semiconductors. Founded in 2016 by the brothers Chen Yunji and Chen Tianshi, Cambricon was added to the US trade blacklist in December 2022, limiting its access to US core technologies and manufacturing services.

Despite these challenges, Cambricon's revenue in the first half of 2025 reached a record high of 2.88 billion yuan (403.8 million US dollars), a 4348% year-on-year increase, and turned a net loss of 1.04 billion yuan from the previous year into a profit of 1.04 billion yuan.

Cambricon explained that this growth was due to "continuous market expansion and positive support for AI applications." It also claimed to have made progress in the hardware/software development of chips used for AI training and inference, expanding support for key AI models in China, including DeepSeek, Alibaba Group's Qwen, and Tencent Holdings' Huan Yuan.

Compatibility with CUDA platform? Alibaba also develops a new AI chip

Meanwhile, China's largest cloud computing company, Alibaba, has developed a new artificial intelligence chip to fill the gap caused by regulatory barriers against Nvidia in China. According to the Wall Street Journal, the chip is more versatile than its predecessor, designed to handle various artificial intelligence inference tasks that do not require cutting-edge chips.

Alibaba has not officially announced, but according to sources from EE Times in the United States, the chip cores use the RISC-V architecture. It is an open-source platform that Alibaba has invested in for years, which is widely supported in China.

Importantly, Alibaba's chip may be compatible with Nvidia's CUDA platform. This allows engineers to transfer existing programs. This contrasts sharply with Huawei's Ascend chips, which, although high-performing, cannot seamlessly integrate with the Nvidia ecosystem.

Although Chinese companies such as Cambricon and MetaX in Shanghai have made significant progress, industry insiders point out that China is still far from producing chips comparable to American top products, especially in the challenging task of training artificial intelligence models.

Chinese factories are facing restrictions on advanced chip manufacturing technology from the United States, and some companies, such as MetaX, are taking measures to combine smaller chips with older technology to compensate for performance losses.

The Chinese government is actively investing in self-sufficient artificial intelligence supply chains, including an 8.4 billion US dollar artificial intelligence investment fund announced in January 2025.

However, as China firmly pushes forward the cultivation of domestic enterprises and reduces reliance on foreign technology, the global artificial intelligence semiconductor market is undergoing a period of transformation, driven by market forces and inevitable geopolitical factors.

The rise of companies like Cambricon highlights China's ambition to challenge established companies and reshape the future of artificial intelligence chip manufacturing.

Original: www.toutiao.com/article/1842471831479296/

Statement: The article represents the views of the author.