Cambricon Technologies

What Cambricon does

Cambricon Technologies is a Chinese chip designer focused on artificial intelligence. In its own description, the company was founded in 2016 and concentrates on research and development of AI chips; its products cover cloud, edge and endpoint deployments, and it also supplies a common base system software platform on which those chips run^[1]. In plain terms, one company builds chips for data-centre servers (cloud), for equipment close to the user such as gateways and cameras (edge), and for consumer devices (endpoint), and provides software so that developers can work with them in a similar way.

Founding and listing

The Zhongguancun Haidian district government records that Cambricon was founded in March 2016^[2], the same year the company gives on its own website^[1]. On 20 July 2020 it listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market, the board aimed at science and technology companies, under the code 688256. It issued 40.1 million shares at 64.39 yuan each, for net proceeds of 2.58 billion yuan^[2]. The Haidian district government described Cambricon as the first AI chip maker to list on the STAR Market^[2].

The product line

By 2026 the company's product line spanned three parts^[3]. The MLU 370 is aimed at cost-effective inference — running a model that has already been trained and returning answers to users. The MLU 590 is aimed at combined training and inference for models with hundreds of billions of parameters. The MLU 690 is aimed at very large-scale training, the stage in which a model is built by repeatedly adjusting its parameters on large amounts of data^[3]. Splitting the line this way means a customer can buy a cheaper chip where it only needs to serve a finished model, and a much heavier one where it needs to train a new one.

The 2025 financial year

Cambricon reported 2025 revenue of 6.497 billion yuan, up 453.21% year on year^[3][4]. Net profit attributable to shareholders was 2.059 billion yuan, a turnaround from a loss of 452 million yuan in 2024^[3][4]. The cloud product line contributed 6.477 billion yuan of revenue, or 99.69% of the total, so the business in that year was almost entirely a data-centre chip business^[3][4].

Volumes grew as well. The company produced 127,700 AI chips and boards in 2025 and sold 117,400, up 409.84% and 201.57% respectively^[3]. The gap between production and sales reflects chips made but not yet sold by the end of the period, rather than units lost.

Spending on research and development was 1.169 billion yuan in 2025, equal to 17.99% of revenue. The R&D team numbered 887 people, or 80.13% of employees^[4] — a staffing profile in which engineers are the large majority of the company, which is typical of a chip design house that does not run its own factories.

Customers and where it sits

The 21st Century Business Herald reported that ByteDance had deployed more than 100,000 MLU 590 and 690 chips, making it Cambricon's largest customer^[3]. Large orders of that kind connect the company's fortunes closely to how much computing capacity a few very large internet firms decide to buy in a given year.

That reliance cuts both ways in reading the results. The 2025 figures show a company that had moved from losses to profit on the back of a rapid expansion in shipments of its cloud chips, with a product line now separated by training and inference workloads and a customer list dominated by one large buyer^[3][4]. Its listing history places it among the first Chinese AI chip firms to reach public markets, and the Haidian district government's account emphasises that first-mover position on the STAR Market^[2].