Chinese AI chip designer Cambricon held an earnings briefing on 12 August and spent much of it defending one line on its balance sheet: RMB 8.248bn of inventory, equal to 45.32% of total assets.
The stockpile
Inventory is up 66.8% from RMB 4.944bn at the end of 2025, split roughly RMB 5.749bn of raw materials and RMB 2.537bn of outsourced-processing materials. For context, the company's entire first-half revenue was RMB 5.996bn — it is holding more inventory than it sold in six months.
The results underneath
Revenue rose 108.13% year on year, net profit attributable to shareholders reached RMB 2.311bn (up 122.61%) and profit excluding non-recurring items RMB 2.166bn (up 137.30%). The cloud product line contributed 99.98% of revenue — effectively a single-product company. R&D spending rose 29.63% to RMB 702m, and research headcount went from 792 to 1,007.
Two ways to read it
Chairman and chief executive Chen Tianshi said procurement is planned against customer orders and market forecasts, and that the company will keep expanding its markets to control the risk. Stockpiling wafers and packaging materials is a rational hedge for a Chinese designer facing supply uncertainty. It is also how a chip company looks shortly before a write-down, and the accounts do not distinguish between the two.
What is being adapted
The company cited active work supporting DeepSeek, Qwen and Kimi models — the domestic frontier stack it needs to run well to justify the capacity it is buying against.
Note on the figures
The half-year report itself was filed in early August; the in-window event is this briefing and the inventory answer. Chinese financial reporting uses 亿 for 100 million, and machine translations of this disclosure have rendered these figures roughly 100 times too high.