Chips & Compute

Export controls have made domestic AI compute a national project. Huawei's Ascend line anchors it, with Cambricon, Moore Threads, Biren, Hygon and Enflame competing for training and inference workloads, and state carriers and city governments building the clusters that buy them. Beneath the GPUs sits a longer supply chain that gets less attention: optical interconnect chips, neuromorphic processors, EDA tools for 3D integration, containerised computing units, and even orbital compute constellations.

This page collects our entries on that supply chain: the first Chinese 3D chip physical design tool, 400 Gbps photodetector chips for 1.6T transceivers, hybrid GPU plus neuromorphic inference systems, funding rounds for brain-inspired chip makers and space-computing startups, and computing platforms built for scientific workloads. Amounts are converted to dollars at the time of filing.