As China's fastest-growing AI chip unicorn, Cambricon plans be listed on the SSE Star Market to become the first AI chip stock since the technology board was launched in the middle of last year
Cambricon is ne of China's first AI chip companies. Four years after its establishment, it won four rounds of financing with a valuation of 17.5 billion yuan (2.5 billion US dollars).
On December 5, 2019, Zhongke Cambricon and CITIC Securities signed an A-share listing guidance agreement, paving way for Cambricon to be listed on SSE Star Market, according to the official website of the Beijing Securities Regulatory Commission announcement on February 28.
In June 2018, two or three months after the establishment of Cambricon, the founder and CEO Chen Tianshi once stated publicly that in the future, he would tend to consider listing in domestic A shares, and because of the name of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Made in China, Earlier financing did not accept overseas background investment institutions.
Since then, SSE Star Market has been launched, and technology companies in the AI field such as Cambricon have attracted much attention. In an interview with the media, Cambricon had previously been silent and did not disclose specific information.
Now, the official website of the Beijing Securities Regulatory Commission disclosed that Cambricon's plan to list on the SSE Star Market has finally surfaced.
Cambricon's chip making road
Cambricon's chip making road was officially opened in 2016. Now it has established chip matrix products covering end, edge, and cloud.
When the company was formally established in March 2016, it launched the first Cambricon 1A processor (Cambricon-1A).
Known as the world's first commercial deep learning processor, it was selected into the 15 "World's Leading Internet Technology Achievements" selected by the Third World Internet Conference and applied to Huawei Kirin 970 chip. It has become an important supplier of Huawei Kirin in the following years one.
The NPU applied to Huawei mobile phones once made Cambricon famous. However, as Huawei entered the field of AI chips and began to replace it with self-research, the role of Cambricon's suppliers also began to change, and the relationship has since become subtle.
In October, the AI inference server test chip was launched, and the world 's first Cambricon chip-based AI inference server, Phanaron, jointly developed with Zhongke Shuguang, was equipped with a Cambricon dedicated AI chip.
In November 2017, the 1H8 processor for low-power scene vision applications, as well as the more versatile and higher-performance 1H16 processor, were applied to the Huawei Kirin 980 chip.
In the same month, Cambricon began to deploy the autonomous driving industry and launched the Cambricon-1M processor.
In May 2018, the cloud AI chips MLU100, MLU200 and cloud server boards equipped with MLU100 were released. MLU100 focuses on reasoning, and MLU200 focuses on training. The former is for small and medium-sized servers, while the latter is for enterprise-level artificial intelligence R & D centers.
At the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Cambricon showed the first-generation cloud AI chip Siyuan 270 for the first time, integrating a series of technologies of Cambricon in the field of processor architecture.
Cambricon revealed that its theoretical peak performance for processing non-sparse deep learning models is four times that of the previous generation MLU100, reaching 128TOPS (INT8); it is also compatible with INT4 and INT16 operations, with theoretical peaks of 256TOPS and 64TOPS respectively; supporting floating-point operations and mixing Precision calculation.
Siyuan 270 uses Cambricon's self-developed MLUv02 instruction set to support highly diverse artificial intelligence applications such as vision, speech, natural language processing, and traditional machine learning. It integrates video and image codec hardware units for vision applications.
Cambricon said that in terms of peak performance, the Siyuan 270 data is very close to the NVIDIA T4.
In November 2019, Cambricon released the edge AI series products Siyuan 220 (MLU220) chips and module products to further cover the end, edge, and cloud scenarios to create a systematic product.
AI chip national team
Cambricon originated from CAS, and its roots can be traced back to the start-up project team with only 7 people in 2009.
In March 2016, Chen Yunji and Chen Tianshi formally co-founded Beijing Cambricon Technology. It is hoped that when the AI explosion looms, the "neural network" processor chips of "deep learning" will change the long-term gap in China's chip industry.
The team members not only include CAS technical elites, but also core participants in China's first general-purpose CPU Godson One.
For specific goals, they hope to increase the computing efficiency of AI chips by 10,000 times and reduce power consumption by 10,000 times. They can put the most advanced AI applications such as "AlphaGo" into mobile phones.
However, because the brothers have different personalities, the division of labor between the two is clear.
The oder brother Chen Yunji was born in 1983. He entered middle school at the age of nine. At the age of 25, he became the chief architect of 8-core Godson-3.
He is more research-oriented in his company position, thinking about the relevant parts of the technical path, rarely holding the title of Cambricon, and mostly showing himself as a "CAS Researcher".
Brother Chen Tianshi was born in 1985 and still a young genius. Part of his growth path followed his brother Chen Yunji. At the age of 16, he was admitted to the Junior Class of the University of Science and Technology of China. At the age of 25, he received his Ph.D.
After graduating with a PhD in 2010, Chen Tianshi became a researcher at the CAS Institute of Computing. In 2014, he won the ASPLOS Best Paper Award and the MICRO Best Paper Award. He is the first Chinese to win the Best Paper Award at these two international conferences.
He is more outgoing and acts as the founder and CEO of Cambricon.
To date, Cambricon has completed a total of 4 rounds of financing.
At the time of the startup, the angel round was valued at US $ 100 million, and was jointly invested by US $ 10 million from CAS's funds and Lenovo Venture Capital.
In August 2016, half a year after its establishment, it received a Pre-A round of financing from Yuanhe Origin, HKUST Xunfei, and Yongye Investment.
In mid-2017, the completion of the A round with a valuation of 1 billion US dollars, SDIC Ventures led the investment, Alibaba, Lenovo Venture Capital, Guoke Investment, Zhongke Turing, Yuanhe Origin and Yongli Investment, etc. Became the first unicorn company in the global AI chip field.
In June 2018, Cambricon announced the completion of hundreds of millions of dollars in Series B financing, with a valuation of $ 2.5 billion, or approximately RMB 17.48 billion. It's more than doubled from $ 1 billion when it was raised a year ago.
Investors include state-owned capital venture capital funds, national new enlightenment, national investment ventures, and joint investment led by national new capital.
It was at this time that Chen Tianshi disclosed the company's listing trend and opened the road to SSE Star Market listing in December 2019.
