On March 23, shares of Cambricon Technologies Corporation Limited (688256.SH), a leading domestic AI chipmaker, experienced a volatile decline in morning trading. By 10:53 a.m., the stock had dropped over 3% to 993.72 yuan per share, officially falling below the 1,000 yuan mark. Year-to-date, Cambricon's share price has now declined by 26.73%. Since hitting a record high of 1,550 yuan per share on January 12, 2026, the stock has retreated by 36%, with its market capitalization shrinking from 654.1 billion yuan to 421.8 billion yuan, evaporating more than 230 billion yuan in value.
Back in August 2025, Cambricon's share price once surpassed that of Kweichow Moutai, becoming the highest-priced stock in the A-share market and attracting significant attention from capital markets.
This downward trend contrasts sharply with the company’s recently reported strongest-ever financial results. On the evening of March 12, Cambricon released its 2025 financial report, showing revenue of 64.97 billion yuan, a surge of 453.21% year-on-year. Net profit attributable to shareholders reached 2.059 billion yuan, successfully turning a profit compared to a loss of 452 million yuan in the same period of 2024. This marks the company’s first annual profit since its establishment in 2016.
Notably, the report also disclosed that well-known retail investor Zhang Jianping increased his holdings. His position grew by 408,400 shares compared to the third quarter of 2025, reaching 6.8149 million shares, accounting for 1.62% of the company’s circulating shares and making him the fifth-largest shareholder. This represents Zhang’s second consecutive quarter of increasing his stake in Cambricon, following an addition of 320,200 shares in the third quarter of 2025.
Behind the stock price correction lies a significant shift in the competitive landscape of the domestic AI chip sector. The market for domestic AI chips has entered a fiercely competitive phase. As a key client of Cambricon, cloud service providers are accelerating the development of their own in-house AI chips, creating direct competition.
According to earlier reports, T-Head, an Alibaba-affiliated AI chip company, has shipped hundreds of thousands of its Zhenwu PPU chips, surpassing Cambricon and leading among domestic GPU manufacturers. However, this information has not been further confirmed by Cambricon. Meanwhile, Kunlun Chip, under Baidu, submitted a confidential application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for a main board listing on January 1. Its chips are not only used for Baidu’s internal AI projects but are also supplied to other industry clients.
At the business level, Cambricon’s market advantage is not particularly strong. A recent IPO filing by Suiyuan Technology cited IDC data and public disclosures, indicating that in the 2024 Chinese AI accelerator market, Nvidia held approximately 70% market share. Cambricon and Suiyuan each held about 1.4%, while Moorethread, Metax, and Biren Technology each held less than 1%. AMD and Days Technology also held less than 1% respectively.
Despite the short-term pressure on its stock price, some brokerages remain optimistic about Cambricon’s future. Donghai Securities believes that with the increasing localization rate of computing chips in China, Cambricon’s Siyuan series of cloud AI chips lead domestically in performance and have gained significant recognition from major CSPs. As the new generation of higher-value Siyuan chips achieves commercial deployment, the company is well-positioned to benefit from the domestic AI infrastructure build-out and the trend toward localization of AI chips, potentially driving further earnings growth.
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