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Chinese GPU maker Cambricon's Q1 revenue hits $423 million as country's homegrown AI chip market accelerates — Chinese chipmakers continue to leech market share from Nvidia
Two of China's most prominent domestic GPU designers have disclosed Q1 2026 earnings, with Cambricon Technologies reporting $423 million in revenue and MetaX Integrated Circuits posting 75% year-over-year growth, according to filings reported by theSouth China Morning Post. The results come as Chinese chipmakers continue to absorb market share from Nvidia, which has watched its dominance in China erode from a pre-sanctions peak of 95% to less than 60%.
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Cambricon posted revenue of 2.89 billion yuan ($423 million) for the quarter, a 160% increase over the same period last year, with its net profit rising 185% to 1 billion yuan. These figures are striking given the company's history — as recently as early 2024, Cambricon was still loss-making and had just lost Huawei as a major customer. Its full-year 2025 revenue reached 6.5 billion yuan with a net profit of 2.06 billion yuan, and marked the company's first annual profit since it was founded in 2016.
Cambricon's top five clients accounted for 94% of the company's revenue in the first half of 2025, with the largest single customer contributing roughly 80%. Chinese media identifies ByteDance as the dominant buyer, with Caixin reporting the TikTok parent pre-ordered approximately 200,000 Siyuan 590 chips. Whether that concentration eased in subsequent quarters is unclear, but Alibaba is also expected to become a significant buyer as it expands domestic AI infrastructure.
Cambricon is one of only two companies on China's government-approved AI hardware procurement list, alongside Huawei; Nvidia, despite easing U.S. restrictions, still isn’t. The company is targeting 500,000 AI accelerator shipments in 2026, up from an estimated 116,000 units in 2025, and reaching that goal depends heavily on SMIC's ability to produce chips at its 7nm-class node, where yields have been reported at around 20%.
MetaX, which went public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in December, reported Q1 revenue of 561.9 million yuan, up 75% year over year, but the company still recorded a net loss of 98.8 million yuan. Founded in 2020 by former AMD engineers, MetaX attributed the revenue growth to higher GPU shipments but remains far smaller than Cambricon and has yet to reach profitability.
Both companies are part of a broader shift in China's AI hardware supply chain. Chinese chipmakers delivered 1.65 million AI GPUs in 2025, capturing 41% of the domestic AI server market, according to IDC figures reported by Reuters in early April.
Huawei led domestic suppliers with approximately 812,000 units shipped. Bernstein analysts project Nvidia's China market share could fall to around 8% in the coming years as local alternatives scale up, though all of these domestic processors remain multiple generations behind Nvidia's current Blackwell architecture, in terms of raw performance.
Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
