In a stark contrast to the thriving AI chip industry, Cambrian, a leading player in the field, has announced its half-year results, revealing a significant downturn in revenue and a substantial loss. The company, which boasts a billion-dollar market value, reported a mere revenue of 64.76 million yuan in the first half of the year, with a net loss of 530 million yuan, marking a 43.42% decrease in revenue compared to the same period last year.
Cambrian’s financial struggles come as a surprise, especially considering the robust growth in the AI chip sector. recently, NVIDIA, the industry’s dominant player, released its second quarter fiscal year 2025 report, which showed a 112% year-over-year increase in revenue. However, Cambrian’s half-year report, released on the evening of August 30, paints a different picture, with the company’s revenue slipping and losses widening.
Cambrian, a company focused on artificial intelligence chips, produces products such as cloud intelligent chips, acceleration cards, and training and edge products. Their chips are used in cloud servers, data centers, and other applications. The company also engages in IP licensing and software, as well as intelligent computing cluster system businesses. The report attributed the decline in revenue to adverse factors in the supply chain.
Despite the revenue dip, Cambrian continues to invest heavily in research and development to maintain its competitive edge in the market. The company has mastered a series of key technologies for complex chip physical design under advanced processes such as 7nm, and these technologies are applied to the design of multiple chips, including the SiYuan 100 and SiYuan 370. Cambrian is also developing a new generation of intelligent processor microarchitecture and instruction sets, which will focus on optimizing the training and inference of natural language processing, video image generation, and recommendation system large models.
Cambrian’s software training platform has also added support for mainstream networks such as the Llama3 series and Qwen series. However, the company’s research and development investment decreased by 7.27% year-on-year in the first half of the year, still accounting for a high proportion of its revenue. In the first half of the year, Cambrian’s research and development investment was 4.47 billion yuan, accounting for 690.92% of its revenue. The most significant investment in this period was in the high-end cloud intelligent chip, with an investment of 2.5 billion yuan. Additionally, the investment in basic system software (inference) and basic system software (training) reached 473.7 million yuan and 946 million yuan, respectively.
As of the end of June this year, Cambrian had 727 R&D personnel, a decrease of 253 people year-on-year. The company also warned of the risk of large share payments, as it has conducted multiple employee equity incentives, resulting in share payment expenses of 112 million yuan during the reporting period. The company’s share payments are expected to continue to amortize in the coming years.
The AI chip industry is facing increasing competition as more and more manufacturers enter the market. Although Cambrian was able to list on the Shanghai Stock Exchange as the first AI chip stock in 2020, its annual revenue has increased from 4.59 billion yuan in 2020 to 7.09 billion yuan in 2023, but the company has yet to resolve its losses. According to a recent report by market research firm Omdia, the rapid growth in the demand for GPUs and other acceleration chips used in cloud computing and data centers will eventually slow down, but it will not slow down before changing the entire industry. The market is expected to reach 1510 billion dollars by 2029.
As a major AI computing company in China, Cambrian’s stock price has fluctuated and shown an upward trend this year. On August 30, the stock price of Cambrian rose by 6.83%, closing at 256.69 yuan per share, with a market value of 1072 billion yuan. Compared to the beginning of the year, the stock price has increased by 90.2%. Despite the current challenges, Cambrian remains committed to advancing the AI chip industry and maintaining its position as a key player in the market.
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