NEW YORK – In 2019, Mr Chen Tianshi was a good distance from turning into one of many wealthiest individuals on the planet.
The largest buyer for his three-year-old synthetic intelligence chip startup, Chinese telecommunications large Huawei Technologies, had abruptly lower off virtually all enterprise in favour of creating its personal semiconductors.
Until then, Huawei had been the supply of over 95 per cent of the corporate’s income.
But then he caught a break from an sudden supply. The US choice to lower off China’s entry to cutting-edge chips and
Beijing’s determination to foster homegrown technology
finally created a halo of state sponsorship and an enormous protected marketplace for the pc prodigy’s firm, which propelled him to turn into one of many world’s richest self-made billionaires.
Shares of his chip designer Cambricon Technologies have surged greater than 765 per cent over the previous 24 months.
His wealth, which is for almost all derived from his 28 per cent stake within the Beijing-based producer of AI accelerators, has greater than doubled to US$22.5 billion (S$29.2 billion) for the reason that starting of 2025, in accordance to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Mr Chen’s meteoric rise underscores how China’s sturdy assist for its home AI trade is minting a brand new class of state-aligned tech elites just some years after it cracked down on its private-sector titans.
As Washington’s export bans choked China’s entry to superior chips, corporations like Mr Chen’s Cambricon have emerged as nationwide champions, shielded by coverage mandates and investor zeal – symbols of a brand new industrial order the place political favour, not market freedom, defines the winners.
Questions over how a lot the numerous assist from authorities protectionism has contributed to Cambricon’s surge – moderately than the competitiveness of its chips – has divided observers over how lengthy the run will final.
“Cambricon’s explosive revenue growth is mainly due to a low starting point, and its current valuation may be inflated without sustained policy support,” stated Mr Shen Meng, director at Beijing-based funding financial institution Chanson & Co.
While Mr Chen continues to be a way off Nvidia founder Jensen Huang’s web value, he’s already the third richest particular person on the earth at or below the age of 40, behind Mr Lukas Walton and Mr Mark Mateschitz, heirs to the Walmart and Red Bull fortunes respectively, in accordance to the index.
Shares of Cambricon – and by extension Mr Chen’s web value – took off in August when Beijing urged native firms to
avoid using market leader Nvidia’s H20 processors
, notably for government-related functions.
The firm stepped in to cool the investor frenzy round its shares, warning in an August submitting to the Shanghai inventory alternate that it nonetheless labors below US sanctions and stressing the difficulties of ascending the know-how ladder. It additionally dispelled hypothesis about non-existent merchandise within the pipeline.
Brokerage notes across the similar time talked about its upcoming Siyuan 690 chip, though it’s believed to nonetheless lag no less than a number of years behind Nvidia’s corresponding product.
“It’s too early to say if Cambricon or Huawei, the leading AI chip designer in China, will become China’s Nvidia, as Nvidia’s full stack including the CUDA ecosystem is extraordinarily hard to replicate quickly,” stated Mr Sunny Cheung, a researcher at Washington-based assume tank Jamestown Foundation, referring to the AI chip large’s proprietary programming language bundled with its {hardware}.
Cambricon didn’t reply to Bloomberg requests for remark.
Despite the questions on Cambricon’s valuation, Mr Chen’s path to success has turn into one thing of a case research for China’s state-supported educational pipeline that additionally spurred the shock breakthrough of AI startup DeepSeek and its millennial founder Liang Wenfeng.
Born in 1985 to {an electrical} engineer father and a historical past trainer mom within the south-east metropolis of Nanchang, Mr Chen’s eager mind was recognized early.
He and his older brother, Mr Chen Yunji, had been fast-tracked right into a program for presented college students at Hefei’s elite University of Science and Technology of China, the place he earned a PhD in laptop science in 2010.
From there, Mr Chen joined his brother as a researcher on the computing institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the centre of the nation’s scientific ambitions funded by state coffers.
That was the place the brothers first garnered broader consideration with internationally acclaimed educational papers on their DianNao accelerator in 2014.
A yr later, they debuted their first chip, a brain-inspired processor for deep studying. That part was named Cambricon, named after the Cambrian explosion to signify it as an early evolutionary start line for AI.
In 2016, the Cambricon undertaking was spun off and based as an organization with the academy an early monetary backer.
It achieved its first breakthrough in 2017 when Huawei used Cambricon’s AI processor know-how to enhance the images and gaming capabilities of its Mate 10 smartphone. That partnership led to 2019 when Huawei began to develop related know-how by itself.
Since then, Cambricon step by step shifted its focus towards designing and promoting AI chips for each cloud servers and edge units.
It was listed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board in Shanghai in 2020, however it was persistently within the purple earlier than it started to e book quarterly earnings for the primary time since its IPO within the three-month interval by December 2024.
It suffered a setback in 2022 when the US Department of Commerce added Cambricon to the so-called entity listing for its efforts to “acquire US-origin items in support of China’s military modernization”, limiting the corporate’s capability to entry superior Western applied sciences.
But the US curbs did little to hinder Cambricon’s prospects. When Washington broadened the export controls to block Nvidia and AMD from promoting any high-performance AI chips to China, it created a provide vacuum.
Beijing responded with power, mandating that home tech corporations “buy local”, which means Chinese firms now have to supply no less than a few of their chips from home producers like Huawei or Cambricon.
Demand exploded. Cambricon’s income surged greater than 500 per cent over the previous 12 months, even because it competes with the likes of Huawei and a slew of different home startups.
“Their rise is directly caused by the urgent need for countries to have access to hardware infrastructure,” stated Mr Shuman Ghosemajumder, co-founder and CEO of Reken, a San Francisco-based AI startup.
“Similar to Nvidia, I think they will likely encounter a lot of variance in their stock price as people decide exactly how much infrastructure is required for practically useful generative AI models, and how much those expectations have been overhyped.” BLOOMBERG