US sanctions propel Chinese AI prodigy to US$23 billion fortune

[BEIJING] In 2019, Chen Tianshi was a long way from becoming one of the wealthiest people on the planet.

The largest customer for his three-year-old artificial intelligence (AI) chip startup, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies, had abruptly cut off almost all business in favour of developing its own semiconductors. Until then, Huawei had been the source of over 95 per cent of the company’s revenue.

But then he caught a break from an unexpected source. The US decision to cut off China’s access to cutting-edge chips and Beijing’s determination to foster homegrown technology ultimately created a halo of state sponsorship and a vast protected market for the computer prodigy’s company, which propelled him to become one of the world’s richest self-made billionaires.

Shares of his chip designer Cambricon Technologies have surged more than 765 per cent over the past 24 months. His wealth, which is for the majority derived from his 28 per cent stake in the Beijing-based producer of AI accelerators, has more than doubled to US$22.5 billion since the beginning of the year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Chen’s meteoric rise underscores how China’s robust support for its domestic AI industry is minting a new class of state-aligned tech elites just a few years after it cracked down on its private-sector titans. As Washington’s export bans choked China’s access to advanced chips, firms such as Chen’s Cambricon have emerged as national champions, shielded by policy mandates and investor zeal – symbols of a new industrial order where political favour, not market freedom, defines the winners.

Questions over how much the significant support from government protectionism has contributed to Cambricon’s surge, rather than the competitiveness of its chips, has divided observers over how long the run will last.

“Cambricon’s explosive revenue growth is mainly due to a low starting point, and its current valuation may be inflated without sustained policy support,” said Shen Meng, director at Beijing-based investment bank Chanson & Co.

While Chen is still some way off Nvidia founder Jensen Huang’s net worth, he’s already the third richest person in the world at or under the age of 40, behind Lukas Walton and Mark Mateschitz, heirs to the Walmart and Red Bull fortunes respectively, according to the index.

Shares of Cambricon – and by extension Chen’s net worth – took off in August when Beijing urged local companies to avoid using market leader Nvidia’s H20 processors, particularly for government-related purposes.

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The company stepped in to cool the investor frenzy around its shares, warning in an August filing to the Shanghai stock exchange that it still labours under US sanctions and stressing the difficulties of ascending the technology ladder. It also dispelled speculation about non-existent products in the pipeline.

Brokerage notes around the same time mentioned its upcoming Siyuan 690 chip, although it’s believed to still lag at least a few 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,” said Sunny Cheung, a researcher at Washington-based think tank Jamestown Foundation, referring to the AI chip giant’s proprietary programming language bundled with its hardware.

Cambricon did not respond to Bloomberg requests for comment.

Despite the questions about Cambricon’s valuation, Chen’s path to success has become something of a case study for China’s state-supported academic pipeline that also spurred the surprise breakthrough of AI startup DeepSeek and its millennial founder Liang Wenfeng.

Born in 1985 to an electrical engineer father and a history teacher mother in the southeast city of Nanchang, Chen’s keen intellect was identified early. He and his older brother, Chen Yunji, were fast-tracked into a programme for gifted students at Hefei’s elite University of Science and Technology of China, where he earned a PhD in computer science in 2010.

From there, Chen joined his brother as a researcher at the computing institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the centre of the nation’s scientific ambitions funded by state coffers.

That’s where the brothers first garnered broader attention with internationally acclaimed academic papers on their DianNao accelerator in 2014. A year later, they debuted their first chip, a brain-inspired processor for deep learning. That component was named Cambricon, named after the Cambrian explosion to signify it as an early evolutionary starting point for AI.

In 2016, the Cambricon project was spun off and founded as a company, with the academy as an early financial backer.

It achieved its first breakthrough in 2017 when Huawei used Cambricon’s AI processor technology to improve the photography and gaming capabilities of its Mate 10 smartphone. That partnership ended in 2019 when Huawei started to develop similar technology on its own. Since then, Cambricon has gradually shifted its focus towards designing and selling AI chips for both cloud servers and edge devices.

It was listed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board in Shanghai in 2020, but it was consistently in the red before it began to book quarterly profits for the first time since its IPO in the three-month period to December 2024.

It suffered a setback in 2022 when the US Department of Commerce added Cambricon to the so-called entity list for its efforts to “acquire US-origin items in support of China’s military modernisation”, limiting the company’s ability to access advanced Western technologies.

But the US curbs did little to hinder Cambricon’s prospects. When Washington broadened the export controls to block Nvidia and AMD from selling any high-performance AI chips to China, it created a supply vacuum. Beijing responded with force, mandating that domestic tech firms “buy local,” meaning Chinese companies now have to source at least some of their chips from domestic manufacturers such as Huawei or Cambricon.

Demand exploded. Cambricon’s revenue surged more than 500 per cent over the past 12 months, even as it competes with the likes of Huawei and a slew of other domestic startups.

“Their rise is directly caused by the urgent need for countries to have access to hardware infrastructure,” said 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