Catenaa, Friday, April 03, 2026- Chinese semiconductor firms have reported record revenue last year driven by AI demand, shortage of memory chips and export restrictions by the US on China.
Analysts and the companies themselves are also expecting further revenue surges this year, underscoring how Chinese chip players are capitalizing on strong demand from domestic tech giants looking to build their AI infrastructure.
Semiconductor Manufacturing International, China’s largest chip manufacturer, said revenue for 2025 rose 16% from a year ago to a record $9.3 billion. Revenue could top $11 billion in 2026, according to LSEG analyst estimates.
Hua Hong, another Chinese chipmaker, said fourth-quarter revenue came in at a record $659.9 million and forecast sales of between $650 million and $660 million.
Moore Threads, which is aiming to rival Nvidia, guided that 2025 revenue would be between $209.8 million and $220 million, a 231% to 247% year-on-year increase.
US restrictions over the past few years, which cut off China from key technologies, have accelerated a self-sufficiency push from Beijing to wean itself off American tech.
More recently, US export curbs on Nvidia’s chips to China has prompted Beijing to encourage local firms to buy domestic alternatives, with companies like Huawei stepping in to fill the void, even if the performance of their semiconductors lags the US.
Memory chip players in China have also seen a boost. Memory, a key component for AI data centers and consumer electronics, is in short supply globally while demand remains high. This has led to an unprecedented spike in prices of memory chips.
ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), one of China’s leading memory players, saw a 130% year-on-year jump in revenue to more than $8 billion, Bloomberg reported last week.
High-bandwidth memory (HBM) is a type of high-end memory required for AI. The market is dominated by the world’s three biggest players in the space who make this type of memory, Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron.
HBM2 and HBM2e are technologies that Samsung and SK Hynix began producing around 2016. CXMT is expected to produce HBM3 this year.
The expertise gained from manufacturing memory chips could lead to advances in other chips, such as GPUs, Albright Stonebridge Group’s Triolo said.
Even as China’s semiconductor players posted record revenues, they continued to lag behind companies in the US, South Korea, Europe and Taiwan when it comes to technological capability.
SMIC and Hua Hong are still unable to manufacture the most advanced chips in the world at scale like market leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC).
That’s because they are not able to access the most advanced tools produced by ASML in the Netherlands due to export restrictions.
While efforts are underway to create domestic alternatives, the complexity of the technology means it is a big task.
