[News] China GPU Race Intensifies: Cambricon Turns Profitable in 2025; Moore Threads, MetaX Narrow Losses

In recent years, restrictions on China’s access to NVIDIA’s high-end chips have tightened; however, these curbs have in turn created unprecedented growth opportunities for domestic chipmakers. According to 21jingji, Chinese chip design companies have reported rising revenue, with firms such as Cambricon, Moore Threads, and MetaX posting strong performance gains.

Notably, as highlighted by ijiwei, the long-standing profitability challenges facing China’s chip companies showed a breakthrough in 2025. Cambricon achieved a sharp turnaround to profit, while GPU firms such as Moore Threads and MetaX significantly narrowed their losses.

Cambricon Achieves Profit Turnaround in 2025

In 2025, Cambricon reported revenue of 6.497 billion yuan, a 453% year-over-year increase, while net profit reached 2.059 billion yuan, reversing a loss of 450 million yuan the previous year, 21jingji adds. The company aims to sustain its lead through continued investment. 21jingji notes that Cambricon raised another 3.985 billion yuan through a private placement last year, with the proceeds allocated to large-model chip platform projects.

Despite its successful turnaround, Leiphone.com reports that Cambricon faced supply chain disruptions late last year, increasing supply-side uncertainty. Its next-generation product, Siyuan 690, originally expected to enter mass production by the end of 2025, is now rumored to be delayed until the second half of 2026 for limited-volume output. Sina also notes that Cambricon has entered a stage of large-order fulfillment, with production capacity emerging as a key variable shaping its earnings outlook.

Moore Threads and MetaX Accelerate Growth but Still Seek Breakthrough Orders

Moore Threads’ revenue has grown at a compound annual rate exceeding 200% over the past three years, reaching 1.5 billion yuan in 2025, up 243% year over year. As 21jingji indicates, the company’s flagship integrated training-and-inference GPU, MTTS5000, has entered mass production, with clusters already deployed to support trillion-parameter model training at computing efficiency comparable to advanced GPU clusters of similar scale.

MetaX, which focuses on full-stack high-performance GPU and computing platforms, has also expanded rapidly. According to 21jingji, the company’s revenue surged from 53.02 million yuan in 2023 to 743 million yuan in 2024—about 14-fold growth (1,301% YoY)—and further rose to 1.644 billion yuan in 2025, up 121% year over year.

Meanwhile, unlike Cambricon, which has entered a phase of large-scale order fulfillment, Moore Threads and MetaX remain at an earlier stage of commercialization. As Sina notes, both companies are still seeking business breakthroughs and large orders while facing similar financial pressures from heavy R&D spending—4.67 billion yuan and 2.943 billion yuan over the past three years and three quarters, roughly three times and 1.5 times their revenues, respectively.

Read more

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(Photo credit: Cambricon)