Cambricon
More info
- Founded
- 2016
- Founders
- Chen Tianshi & Chen Yunji
- Type
- AI chip (NPU)
Chinese designer of AI accelerators, named after the Cambrian explosion and seen as a domestic alternative to Nvidia.
Cambricon (寒武纪) was founded in 2016 by brothers Chen Tianshi and Chen Yunji, both researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Computing Technology. The company designs NPUs — chips specialised for neural-network math — and its early IP sat inside Huawei's Kirin processors before Huawei moved to its own design.
In 2022 Cambricon was added to the US Entity List, cutting it off from the most advanced manufacturing processes. Even so, the company — listed on Shanghai's STAR Market — is seen as a key piece of China's effort to replace Nvidia in AI compute, more for its strategic role than because the volumes yet match.