Four of China's largest AI accelerator manufacturers — Huawei, Cambricon, MetaX, and Iluvatar CoreX — have raised prices on their processors. For certain models, the increase has reached 50%, Reuters reports, citing three sources familiar with the matter. The companies did not respond to the agency's requests.
Huawei has raised the indicative price of its Ascend 950DT card to above 250,000 yuan (approximately $37,300) — a 20–50% increase compared to the prices the company was quoting to customers two months ago. Cambricon raised the target price for its processor, codenamed 690, by 20–30% relative to the level of two months ago. MetaX and Iluvatar CoreX also revised their price lists upward, but did not disclose exact figures.
The primary driver of the price hikes is a global shortage of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which enables fast transfer of large volumes of data between the processor and the system. On December 2, 2024, the Bureau of Industry and Security of the US Department of Commerce introduced new restrictions on supplies of certain types of HBM to China, including memory of foreign manufacture. As a result, Chinese manufacturers are increasingly relying on gray market procurement, where such memory costs several times more than from official suppliers outside China. Since memory accounts for a significant share of the cost of AI accelerators, rising acquisition costs are directly reflected in the price of finished cards.
For context: the price of the Ascend 950PR rose from approximately 60,000 yuan at the start of the year to over 80,000 yuan (an increase of roughly 30%), while the Ascend 910C climbed from 90,000 to over 110,000 yuan. Huawei has stated that the Ascend 950 series uses its own proprietary memory technologies — HiBL 1.0 in the 950PR model and HiZQ 2.0 in the 950DT — but has not disclosed where or how these components are manufactured.
The component shortage is also affecting the allocation of available capacity. According to Reuters sources, in 2026 Iluvatar CoreX doubled its GPU shipments to major technology customer ByteDance to 100,000 units, redirecting to it a portion of output originally intended for its own needs. Huawei remains the largest supplier of AI chips to ByteDance, followed by Cambricon and Iluvatar CoreX. Huawei has previously pledged to release a new generation of Ascend processors annually and to double their performance each year.