Cambricon: China’s AI chip powerhouse emerges

Designing NPUs, GPUs for diverse AI applications.

July 30, 2025

Jon Peddie

Based in Beijing, Cambricon, founded in 2016 by Professor Chen Tianshi, commercializes brain-inspired AI chips. It went public in 2020. The company designs and sells NPU and GPU chips for cloud, edge, and terminal devices, including MLU-series accelerators for LLMs. Pioneers of the DianNaoYu instruction set (2014), their processors showed significant performance gains. Despite US sanctions impacting access to advanced manufacturing and hindering competitiveness, Cambricon, facing seven years of losses through 2023, relies on government clients for stable but insufficient revenue growth. Based in Beijing and founded in March 2016, Cambricon was spun out of a project at the Chinese

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Cambricon: China’s AI chip powerhouse emerges

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