Chinese Chip Giant Cambricon Closes Series B With Valuation of $2.5 Billion

Cambricon Technologies announced today that it has secured hundreds of million dollars in its Series B funding round, with investments from China’s State-owned Capital Venture, SDIC Venture Capital, China Capital Investment Group, TCL Capital, CITIC Securities, Alibaba VC, Lenovo Capital & Incubator Group and others.

The smart chip startup’s valuation now stands at US$2.5 billion.

Cambricon pioneered the development of smart chips and processors with high performance and low power consumption for AI R&D. Cambricon-1A is the company’s first generation AI chip for edge devices and the world’s first deep learning processor for commercial use. The company has also released the derivative chips Cambricon-1H and Cambricon-1M.

As reported by Synced, last month Cambricon introduced its third-generation AI chip for edge devices, Cambricon-1M. With its TSMC 7nm technology, the AI chip provides efficient performance of 5 TOPS/Watt for 8-bit computing. The 1M chip is available in 2, 4, and 8 TOPS versions to support a range of AI applications. Cambricon 1M supports deep learning models such as CNN, RNN, SOM; and supports SVM, k-NN, k-Means, decision trees and other algorithms. This is also the world’s first AI processor supporting local machine learning training.

Cambricon has made significant contributions to cloud computing. Along with Cambricon-1M, the company also unveiled Cambricon-MLU100, the first in its new product series supporting cloud computing. MLU100 adopts Cambricon’s latest MLUv01 architecture and TSMC 16nm technology. This processor has the capability of providing 128 TFLOPS/166.4 TFLOPS in balance mode and high-performance mode respectively. MLU100 has been applied to a wide range of AI fields, including computer vision, voice recognition, NLP etc.

Cambricon says the new investments will help the company “continue to devote itself to spreading smart chip ideas, technologies and products to every corner of the world, allowing machines to better understand and serve humanity.”

Author: Jessie Geng | Editors: Meghan Han, Michael Sarazen