Cambricon joins China’s trillion-yuan AI chip valuation club

Cambricon’s move into the trillion‑yuan club, alongside Zhongji Xuchuang and Zhipu, underlines how Chinese capital markets are now treating the AI stack—chips, optical interconnects and foundation models—as national champions. These three firms control critical rungs of China’s AI value chain: compute, high‑bandwidth data movement and large models. Their rapid rerating from loss‑making experiments to some of the most valuable names on domestic exchanges shows investors believe Beijing will continue to back AI as a strategic sector and tolerate volatile earnings in exchange for tech sovereignty. ([finance.eastmoney.com](https://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202606303788515966.html))

For the global race to AGI, a trillion‑yuan Cambricon matters because it gives a domestic chip provider the currency to fund massive capex and R&D independent of NVIDIA and US export controls. Similarly, Zhipu’s ascent as the first trillion‑yuan Chinese company built primarily on a homegrown general‑purpose model signals that local model ecosystems can achieve large‑cap status even without matching the very frontier of capability. In aggregate, these valuations help ensure that, whatever happens with Western licensing or sanctions, China will have well‑capitalized players pushing the frontier of models and hardware on its own terms.