Cambricon profit jumps 131% as revenue more than doubles in first nine months of 2026

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Cambricon Technologies, the Shanghai-listed AI chip designer that has become one of China’s main answers to Nvidia, just posted a nine-month report most companies would frame and hang on the wall. Net profit attributable to shareholders climbed 131.49% year over year to 3.715 billion yuan for the first three quarters of 2026.

Revenue did its part too, more than doubling over the same stretch. The catch sits in the fine print: the third quarter came in well short of what analysts had pencilled in, and a shortage of a key memory component appears to be the reason.

The numbers behind the surge

For January through September, Cambricon booked revenue of 9.526 billion yuan. That marks a 106.76% increase from the same period a year earlier.

The third quarter on its own looked similar. Q3 revenue reached 3.531 billion yuan, up 104.47% year over year and 13.5% higher than the prior quarter.

Q3 net profit hit 1.404 billion yuan, or approximately $210 million at current exchange rates. That figure represents a 147.74% gain from the third quarter of 2025.

Gross margins held steady at about 56.5%.

The miss, the memory, and the warehouse

Analysts had expected Q3 revenue of around 6.26 billion yuan, so the actual result fell significantly short of the forecast.

The culprit, per the company’s reporting, is supply rather than demand. Ongoing supply chain problems, especially a shortage of high-bandwidth memory, held back shipments.

That bottleneck shows up on the balance sheet. Inventory rose to 11.665 billion yuan by the end of September, a significant increase from previous periods.

Management is not blinking. Chairman and CEO Chen Tianshi reiterated the full-year revenue target of at least 13.5 billion yuan during an earnings briefing on October 26.

Why Cambricon is growing this fast

The company attributes its momentum to rising demand for AI applications, particularly cloud-focused workloads.

Key customers reportedly include DeepSeek and Moonshot, both of which are transitioning away from Nvidia hardware.

Morgan Stanley estimates that Cambricon holds roughly 14% of China’s AI chip market. That puts it second only to Huawei, which remains the heavyweight in the domestic field.

The company also continues to spend heavily on research and development. Its focus is on chips and software optimized for large models, the kind of systems that power modern chatbots and AI assistants.

What this means for investors and the AI chip race

For anyone tracking Cambricon’s stock, listed in Shanghai under the ticker 688256.SH, this report offers two stories at once. Demand looks robust, margins look stable, and profit is compounding faster than revenue.

The inventory build is the metric to watch next. If HBM supply improves, that 11.665 billion yuan stockpile could convert into revenue quickly, which would make the full-year target look comfortable.