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China's AI chipmakers raise prices as high-bandwidth memory shortage bites: Report
The increases reflect a global HBM shortage that is raising the cost of building domestic alternatives to Nvidia chips, sources said.
Chinese AI chipmakers including Huawei Technologies and Cambricon sharply raised prices for processors on Thursday, citing soaring costs for high-bandwidth memory that squeeze efforts to build domestic alternatives to Nvidia.
Since Washington tightened controls on advanced HBM exports to China in December 2024, Chinese chipmakers have increasingly relied on expensive grey-market channels, complicating domestic AI capacity in China's $50 billion market.
Huawei raised its Ascend 950DT card price to above $37,255, representing a jump of up to 50%, while Cambricon repriced its next-generation 690 chip 20% to 30% higher than two months prior.
Smaller rivals MetaX and Iluvatar CoreX also implemented price increases, with Iluvatar CoreX doubling GPU shipments to ByteDance to 100,000 units this year as computing constraints intensified.
The advanced HBM market remains dominated by South Korea's SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics, and Micron Technology, while Huawei prepares to release the Ascend 950 series with proprietary HiBL 1.0 and HiZQ 2.0 technologies in the fourth quarter of 2026.