Wafer prices at Chinese foundries moved up 5 to 15 percent between the first and second quarters, and TrendForce expects another round of increases for the second half. The pricing power is the flip side of export controls, which have pushed Chinese accelerator demand away from TSMC and toward domestic fabs, and Beijing’s explicit target of 70 percent domestic wafer sourcing this year, echoed by a Bloomberg Intelligence survey of 60 Chinese technology firms, points the same way.
SMIC’s latest quarter shows how much the dynamic has shifted. Revenue reached $3.01B, up 20 percent from the prior quarter, well above the 14 to 16 percent growth the company had guided to. Gross margin rose to 25.3 percent from 20.1 percent in Q1. Shipments climbed 14 percent to 2.9 million 8-inch equivalents.
GPUs are not the driver. SMIC’s chairman attributes the surge to AI chips beyond CPUs and GPUs, among them logic ICs, BCD power-management devices and optical transceiver components, all of which are in short supply.
Over at Hua Hong, utilization reached 102.8 percent the same week, and the company’s revenue set a record at $717.5M, up 26.8 percent year over year. The tailwind also shows up downstream: Cambricon’s first-half revenue jumped 108 percent to 6 billion yuan, roughly $890M, with net profit up 122.6 percent, while Moore Threads grew revenue 147 percent to 1.74 billion yuan and cut its net loss by 96 percent.
