Leading Chinese artificial intelligence chipmakers, including Huawei Technologies and Cambricon, have sharply raised prices for current and next-generation AI processors due to escalating costs for high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Huawei increased the indicated price of its upcoming Ascend 950DT accelerator card by 20 to 50 percent over the past two months to more than 250,000 yuan ($37,255), while Cambricon raised indicated pricing for its planned 690 chip by 20 to 30 percent. Smaller domestic competitors, including MetaX and Iluvatar CoreX, have implemented similar price hikes. The increases extend to earlier-generation hardware as well, with Huawei’s Ascend 950PR and Ascend 910C cards seeing price gains of roughly 30 and 22 percent since the start of the year.
The sharp price escalation reflects how a global shortage of HBM, coupled with stringent U.S. export controls on advanced memory technologies, is directly impacting Beijing’s push to build domestic alternatives to Nvidia. Because high-bandwidth memory accounts for a substantial portion of an AI accelerator’s total manufacturing cost, Chinese manufacturers relying on gray-market procurement channels are facing premium supply prices that feed directly into finished hardware. These rising production costs are increasing the capital requirements for building domestic AI computing infrastructure in China, forcing domestic suppliers to reshuffle hardware allocations to prioritize major tech clients like ByteDance amid tightening computational constraints.
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