China's Cambricon posts first profit as demand for this Nvidia rival's AI processors explodes

A Cambricon AI accelerator
(Image credit: Cambricon)

Cambricon Technologies, a leading developer of AI processors from China, achieved its first-ever quarterly profit in late 2024. This financial upturn occurred after years of being in the red, reports the South China Morning Post. The company's products have become significantly more popular in China in recent quarters after the U.S. government banned sales of Nvidia's advanced AI GPUs to the People's Republic.

Cambricon's revenue surged nearly 70% in 2024, reaching approximately ¥1.2 billion ($163.7 million), which is a fraction of the $90 billion earned by Nvidia globally, but represents significant growth. Cambricon's quarterly profit for Q4 2024 ranged between ¥240 million and ¥328 million ($32.74 million to $44.74 million), marking a turnaround after losing ¥724 million ($98.76 million) in the first three quarters. This brought its full-year loss for 2024 down to ¥396 - ¥484 million ($54 million - $66 million), a substantial improvement compared to previous years.

As the adoption of Cambricon's hardware expanded in China over the past several quarters (including adoption by Huawei), the company has also seen its stock on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s Star Market skyrocket by over 470% in the past year, amid the shortage of Nvidia's GPUs in China. The company's stock climbed from ¥120.80 to ¥695.96 over the past year.

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Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • JTWrenn
    More and more this seems like a bad idea. We are just massively incentivizing them to home grow their tech. I think a tariff in an export makes way more sense and ear mark all those tariffs for tech manufacturing. Export tariff good import bad.
    Reply
  • aero1x
    duh... best way to kill that baby in the cradle is flood their market with our stuff and get em hooked on our stuff. And then you have real leverage. As it is now you're letting the genie outta the bottle from which there's no going back. Gj US government!
    Reply