On 24 August, media reports said the US government is considering approving Apple’s purchase of products from Chinese memory makers, in a move to ease the storage supply pressure the company currently faces. According to the reports, Apple has already been testing DRAM and NAND chips from two Chinese memory suppliers. If later cleared for … Read more
On 23 August, Bloomberg reported on Saturday that some of Nvidia’s largest customers have been told that servers containing its artificial-intelligence chips will in many cases rise more than 15 per cent, because memory-chip costs are surging. The price increase takes effect from the start of next year and covers systems built on the flagship … Read more
Before Groq’s LPU rode Nvidia’s spotlight to fame, Yuanchuan Micro founder and CEO Yang Bin was already sketching an inference chip. LeiFeng Net has learned exclusively that the LPU start-up has closed a several-hundred-million-yuan Pre-A round led by IDG Capital, with Futong Capital, JK Venture, Shangqi Capital, Shunxi Fund and Xuhui Sci-Tech Innovation Investment joining. … Read more
A new wave of chip funding is clustering under one label, “3D stacking”, but the companies behind it are solving three different problems. Near-memory computing, compute-in-memory and 3D near-memory sound alike and some have raised about 1 billion yuan across two rounds, yet their markets and proof points diverge. The first route recombines logic chiplets, … Read more
Alibaba’s latest results make one awkward point: while the spotlight sits on model and app layers, the shortest-term AI profit is in cloud and silicon. In the first quarter of fiscal 2027, the April to June 2026 period, Alibaba Cloud revenue reached 48.74 billion yuan, about 6.8 billion dollars, up 45 per cent year on … Read more
On 20 August, Nvidia denied a Reuters report that it planned to launch a customised “Language Processing Unit” (LPU) for Chinese customers before the end of the year. “The report on Nvidia’s LPU is wrong. We do not sell an LPU in the China market, nor do we have an LPU product roadmap for China,” … Read more
China’s AI has posted a run of breakthroughs this year, from DeepSeek’s DeepSeek-V4 series to Moonshot’s Kimi K3, a 3-trillion-parameter open-source model, and Zhipu’s GLM-5.3, whose coding ability approaches top closed models. Behind the models sits compute. Despite US limits on advanced AI chips and semiconductor equipment, domestic compute such as Huawei’s Ascend has broken … Read more
Qianhe Yibang, a leader in 3D compute-in-memory chips, recently closed a B round above 2 billion yuan. As China accelerates high-quality integrated-circuit development and Indigenous breakthroughs in core technologies, innovative firms with self-developed ability and new chip architectures are becoming central to industrial upgrading. Globally, the digital economy has entered a compute-centric phase, and memory … Read more
For years, three words trailed SMIC wherever it went: behind, restricted, catching up. It could not buy the best tools, could not take the most advanced orders, and the market kept asking the same question: when would it close the gap with TSMC? For a company carrying the hopes of China’s domestic chipmaking, simply surviving … Read more
Zeng Yi’s office tea was refilled again and again as the conversation unfolded, a typical Guangdong reception: no need to sit stiff, but the matter was clear. He speaks with a Chaoshan accent, not fast, always finishing a sentence with a smile, eyes narrowing, leaning in, easy to relax around. Talk of AI and RISC-V … Read more