China’s AI demand rises as domestic chips and infrastructure expand
China’s AI compute market saw stronger model usage, domestic chip activity and infrastructure investment, alongside global supply constraints highlighted by NVIDIA.
• China’s average daily token calls exceeded 500 trillion as of June 2026, with Chinese large models described as having reached the global first tier and competition shifting toward agent deployment and ecosystems.
• Zhipu released and open-sourced GLM-5.3-Flash, while Moore Threads said its MTT S5000 accelerator and MUSA software stack provided Day-0 support for the model’s training and inference.
• Wuxi Muxi Integrated Circuit completed a Series B financing round worth several hundred million yuan to advance 400G/800G scale-out smart NICs and GPU scale-up interconnect chips for China’s domestic AI computing chain.
• Hubei X-Chip Technology completed a nearly 5 billion yuan Series A round and plans a 3D advanced-packaging pilot line, targeting monthly output of 100,000 wafers and 10 billion yuan in revenue.
• SMIC reported first-half revenue of 38.635 billion yuan and net profit of 4.467 billion yuan, up 19.4% and 94.2% year on year, respectively, driven by higher wafer shipments, average selling prices and product-mix changes.
• Victory Giant Technology reported first-half revenue of 11.629 billion yuan and net profit of 2.857 billion yuan, with growth attributed in part to AI-computing demand, high-end products and more than 50 new customers.
• NVIDIA reported second-quarter revenue of $96.2 billion, including $89 billion from data centers, and said shortages of wafers, HBM memory and data-center power could persist through at least fiscal 2028, while forecasting 70% fiscal 2028 revenue growth.