Two filings landed fifty minutes apart on the evening of 28 August Beijing time. CXMT (长鑫科技), China's only large DRAM maker, reported H1 2026 revenue of 1503.1亿元 — ¥150.31bn, up 873.64% — and net profit attributable to shareholders of 776.05亿元, ¥77.605bn, against a loss of ¥2.332bn a year earlier. Operating cash flow was ¥131.156bn, up 2,985.64%. Weighted average return on equity was 81.06%. The company has sixty holders of record.

Inspur, the same evening

Inspur Information (浪潮信息), China's largest AI server maker, reported revenue of ¥84.379bn, up just 5.22%, with net profit up 269.59% to ¥2.952bn. Operating cash flow was negative ¥7.493bn, down 34.39% year on year, against a 77.2% debt ratio and ROE of 12.74%.

What the common framing gets wrong

Start with the unit, because the error is already in circulation. 亿 is 100 million, not one billion. An automated summary of this very filing produced "net profit 776.05 billion yuan" and "revenue 1,503.1 billion yuan" — a tenfold inflation sitting one copy-paste from publication. The real figures are roughly US$10.9bn of profit on US$21bn of revenue.

Second: this is a memory price cycle, not an AI-chip breakthrough. CXMT makes DRAM. Its HBM programme is still a research line — the STAR Market listing earmarked around ¥29.5bn partly to develop it. Anything framing these numbers as China answering SK hynix in HBM is describing an ambition, not the half-year that produced them. The +873% comes off a depressed base plus a DRAM price spike driven by AI demand at other companies' fabs.

Third, the part nobody is saying: CXMT could not forecast its own quarter. The May prospectus guided H1 revenue of ¥110–120bn and net profit of ¥50–57bn; a later flash raised the profit range to ¥66–75bn. Actual: ¥150.31bn and ¥77.6bn — and this from a company that lost more than ¥30bn across the preceding three years.

Inspur's headline is the wrong number

Profit up 270% on revenue up 5% is a margin event, not a demand event. And the cash statement points the other way from the profit line. One caution for anyone quoting the source: IT之家 marks its own body text as machine-generated, and its bullet summary renders that negative cash flow as a positive ¥7.493bn, contradicting the table three lines above it. Only the tables are safe to cite.