Chip stocks rally as Zhipu and Wuxi advance domestic compute projects

China’s AI compute news was led by a broad semiconductor rally, new domestic infrastructure projects, and continued activity around foundation-model deployment and compute supply chains.

• Chinese chip and semiconductor-equipment stocks rallied broadly on July 21, with the ChiNext Index up more than 6%, the STAR 50 up nearly 8%, and advanced packaging, memory chips, CPO and related themes among the leading gainers.

• Several chip ETFs posted sharp gains and inflows, including Fullgoal STAR Market Chip ETF (588810), which rose more than 10.5% intraday and recorded 129 million yuan in net inflows over 10 trading days.

• Zhipu rose more than 30% in afternoon trading after reports that it had launched a 1 GW domestic computing power center, while a separate report said the company had begun partial operations at a large data center built entirely with Chinese-made chips.

• Wuxi and Sugon signed a strategic cooperation agreement to jointly build the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi and deepen collaboration in computing power services, chip design, aerospace information and smart cities.

• Alibaba Cloud said its Function Compute Cloud Sandbox will shift region by region to a new billing model from July 31, introducing Eco, Std and Pro computing power tiers while sharply cutting pay-as-you-go unit prices.

• Moonshot AI’s Kimi team said a computing power shortage forced it to suspend new consumer subscriptions, while China Securities said Kimi K3’s launch could drive further expansion of domestic computing power infrastructure.

• Transwarp released a GPU-native database, saying full database migration to GPUs requires rewriting modules including the storage engine, query optimizer and transaction management.

• AI infrastructure demand continued to support optical communications suppliers, with Eoptolink and TFC Communication forecasting sharp first-half increases and Three-Circle Group citing global data center construction as a driver of optical communications product sales.