2026 H1 AI Chip Industry Review: Blackwell Ultra, the Domestic Big Three, and the Inference Era
In the first half of 2026, the AI chip industry underwent a historic turning point — the center of gravity shifted from the "training race" to "inference efficiency," domestic chip market share broke 40% for the first time, NVIDIA built higher barriers with Blackwell Ultra, and the inference-specific chip track bloomed in diversity.
I. Compute Doubles Again: NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra Launch (June 1)
On June 1, 2026, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the new-generation AI chip Blackwell Ultra at Computex 2026 (Taipei), setting a new starting line for the AI infrastructure race over the next two years.
Key Specs
| Metric | Blackwell Ultra | B200 | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| FP8 compute | 20 petaFLOPS | ~10 petaFLOPS | 100% |
| Architecture | Blackwell Ultra | Blackwell | Upgrade |
| Expected delivery | 2027 Q1 | 2026 Q1 | — |
| Positioning | Hyperscale training + inference | Training + inference | Flagship |
Industry Significance
- Direct impact of doubled compute: 20 petaFLOPS FP8 means training time for hundred-billion-parameter models drops sharply; trillion-parameter model training moves from "scientific experiment" to "engineering routine"
- System-level balance: Blackwell Ultra is not just a chip but a system-level engineering breakthrough across NVLink, HBM, cooling, and power delivery
- Roadmap certainty: The Q1 2027 delivery timeline lets cloud vendors and AI labs plan infrastructure budgets 18 months ahead
Challenges
- Energy crisis: Doubled performance comes with sharply higher power; datacenter power and cooling design face extreme challenges
- Accessibility: Top-tier compute goes first to top cloud vendors; how smaller developers and research institutes reach compute at reasonable cost via cloud services
- Software stack adaptation: New hardware needs matching CUDA versions and framework support; software ecosystem maturity becomes the key bottleneck for compute conversion
II. Domestic AI Chips: The Tipping Point from "Usable" to "Good"
On June 16, 2026, Xinchuang World published "2026 China Domestic AI Chip Vendor Capability Quadrant", clearly outlining the overall domestic landscape.
2.1 Capability Quadrant Ranking
| Quadrant | Representative Vendors |
|---|---|
| Leader quadrant | Huawei Ascend, Hygon, Cambricon, Alibaba T-Head, Moore Threads |
| Visionary quadrant | Baidu Kunlunxin, Biren, Enflame, Iluvatar, HardyVision |
| Contender quadrant | TSINGMICRO, Black Sesame, SemiDrive, Lisuan, Houmo |
| Challenger quadrant | Denglin, Zhicun, VeriSilicon, Rockchip, Intellifusion |
2.2 Huawei Ascend: The Anchor of Domestic Compute
Market Position
- In 2025, Ascend series shipped 812,000 units, capturing 49% of the domestic AI accelerator card share, firmly No.1 domestically
- Ascend 950PR single-card FP8 compute reaches 1P (PetaFLOPS), FP4 compute reaches 2P
- Inference performance is about 2.87x that of NVIDIA H20, priced at only 72,000-75,000 RMB, a significant price/performance advantage
Full-Stack Advantage
Huawei's "device-network-cloud-chip" integrated strategy is Ascend's core moat:
- Chip design: Da Vinci 3.0 architecture iterating continuously
- OS: HarmonyOS/Euler OS deeply optimized
- Networking: Euler network protocol stack
- Cloud: Huawei Cloud ModelArts platform seamlessly integrated
Latest Progress
- On June 5, 2026, Shenzhen Hetao College, together with HIT (Shenzhen) and Huawei, completed full-parameter post-training of a 1.6-trillion-parameter DeepSeek V4 Pro model on an Ascend 910C cluster
- This is the first time domestic AI chips completed trillion-parameter-level model training, marking "domestic substitution" moving from inference to training
2.3 Cambricon: The First Profitable Domestic AI Chip Benchmark
Performance Explosion
| Metric | Full-year 2025 | 2026 Q1 | YoY Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | 6.497B RMB | 2.885B RMB | +453% / +160% |
| Net profit | 2.059B RMB (first annual profit) | 1.013B RMB | — / +185% |
Core Product: Siyuan 590
- In DeepSeek R1 inference scenarios, TPS reaches 942, about 50% higher than H20
- Years of joint optimization with ByteDance; strongest short-term cloud inference deployment capability
- Of 2.885B RMB Q1 2026 revenue, Siyuan 590 contributed over 70%
Potential Risks
Absent from the 2nd 2026 "Safe and Reliable Evaluation Results Announcement"; the reason is unclear and will affect its domestic government/enterprise market performance.
2.4 TSINGMICRO: The "Third Route" of Reconfigurable Chips
Technical Route
TSINGMICRO adopts a reconfigurable dataflow architecture同源 with Groq LPU, finding a balance between GPU generality and ASIC extreme efficiency.
| Metric | TSINGMICRO TX81 | Traditional GPU | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inference cost | Baseline | +100% | Reduced 50% |
| Energy efficiency | Baseline | Baseline | 3x improvement |
| Architecture | Reconfigurable dataflow | SIMT/SIMD | Better for inference |
Deployment Progress
- Cumulative shipments of reconfigurable chips exceed 30 million units
- Scaled deployment in a dozen-plus thousand-card-scale intelligent computing centers nationwide
- Has begun A-share IPO tutoring; likely to become the "first reconfigurable chip stock"
III. The Inference Chip Track: Core Signal of the Industry Shift
On June 4, 2026, TrendForce published a deep report "The Era of Inference Economy: The Rules of AI Chips Are Being Rewritten," pointing out that the compute competition center of gravity is shifting from training to inference.
3.1 Why Now?
Cost Structure Changed
- Training is a one-time cost: Once a model is trained, marginal cost approaches zero
- Inference is a recurring cost: Every API call, every generated token represents compute consumption and gross-margin pressure
- Per-unit inference cost and energy efficiency directly affect gross margin and scale-expansion capability
Model Compression Tech Matured
- 1.58-bit quantization and weight pruning let models maintain inference accuracy at extremely low memory footprint
- MoE (Mixture of Experts) architecture activates only a few expert sub-networks per inference via "partial wake-up," greatly reducing actual computation
- The rise of slimmed models provides commercial viability for hard-wired inference chips
3.2 NVIDIA's $20B Bet: Acquiring Groq (December 2025)
On December 24, 2025, NVIDIA acquired Groq's inference technology license and core team for $20 billion, one of NVIDIA's largest M&A/tech acquisitions ever.
Strategic intent:
- Fill the inference gap: NVIDIA GPU is unshakable in training, but inference efficiency was never its strongest suit
- Counter specialized inference chips: Cerebras, Taalas, SambaNova and other startups are eroding the inference market
- Position for Agentic AI: Agentic AI needs extremely low-latency, high-throughput inference
3.3 Taalas HC1: Proof of Concept for Hard-Wired Inference
On February 20, 2026, Canadian AI chip startup Taalas launched inference chip Taalas HC1, directly etching Meta's open-source AI model Llama 3.1 8B into the chip.
Key Metrics
| Metric | Taalas HC1 | NVIDIA B200 (throughput optimized) | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inference rate | 16,960 tokens/s/user | Baseline | ~4-5x |
| Cost per million tokens | 0.75 cents | 3.79 cents | Reduced 80% |
| Power | ~250W | ~700W | Reduced 64% |
| Process | TSMC N6 | TSMC 4nm | More mature |
| HBM | ❌ Not used | ✅ HBM3e | Lower cost |
Technical Principle
Taalas HC1 uses an aggressive Computing-in-Memory (CIM) implementation:
- Model weights directly固化 in Mask ROM (fully hardware-defined)
- On-chip SRAM handles dynamic data (KV cache and LoRA fine-tuning weights)
- Only 2 mask layers need modification to produce a dedicated chip for another AI model; turning an AI model into a physical chip takes only 2 months
Limitations
- Lack of flexibility: Hard-wiring cannot cope with rapidly iterating model updates
- Ecosystem barrier: The current cloud market still relies on general-purpose platforms; customers may prefer flexible solutions that upgrade with models
- NRE cost: High one-time engineering cost, requiring sufficient deployment scale to amortize
3.4 Cerebras: The IPO Path of Wafer-Scale Integration
On May 14, 2026, Cerebras Systems officially listed on NASDAQ, becoming the first wafer-scale AI chip company to go public.
Core Technology: Wafer-Scale Integration (WSI)
- WSE-3 (third-gen wafer-scale engine): An entire 12-inch wafer as a single chip
- 44GB on-chip SRAM: No external HBM, eliminating the memory bandwidth bottleneck
- 21 PB/s bandwidth: On-chip communication bandwidth, thousands of times that of GPUs
- Partnership with OpenAI: Signed a 3-year, 750MW, $20B+ compute cooperation agreement
IPO Significance
Cerebras's listing marks the maturation of the inference-specific chip track:
- Capital markets begin pricing such companies
- Proves "non-GPU" technical routes have commercial viability
- Provides valuation references for other inference chip startups (Groq, SambaNova, Taalas, etc.)
3.5 Inference Chip Landscape: Multiple Technical Routes Coexist
| Company | Technical Route | Core Advantage | Representative Product |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taalas | Hard-wired (Mask ROM) | Extreme inference efficiency, low cost | HC1 |
| Cerebras | Wafer-scale integration (WSI) | Ultra-high bandwidth, large-model inference | WSE-3 |
| Groq | SRAM-first architecture | Deterministic latency, high throughput | LPU (acquired by NVIDIA) |
| d-Matrix | Digital in-memory compute (DIMC) | More flexible than hard-wiring | Corsair |
| Etched | Hard-wired Transformer | Works for all Transformer models | Sohu |
| Axelera AI | Digital in-memory compute (D-IMC) + RISC-V | High energy efficiency | Metis AIPU |
TrendForce predicts:
- General-purpose GPUs still dominate training and multi-model environments
- But in mature, predictable scenarios, general-purpose GPU profit margins will be compressed
- The industry shifts from general compute monopoly to a dual-track structure of general + specialized coexistence
IV. Overall Domestic AI Chip Landscape in H1 2026
4.1 Industry Enters Scale-Up Phase
| Metric | 2025 | 2026 Q1 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domestic AI accelerator shipments | 1.65M units (41% share) | — | Rising |
| Total China AI accelerator shipments | ~4M units | — | — |
| Hygon revenue growth | — | Doubled | ↑ |
| Cambricon revenue growth | — | +160% | ↑ |
| Moore Threads revenue growth | — | Doubled | ↑ |
Leading vendors collectively entered the revenue realization channel, moving from "technical validation" to "scale commercialization."
4.2 Three Core Development Trends
Trend 1: Capitalization Wave Reshapes the Landscape
- Late 2025 to early 2026: Moore Threads, Iluvatar listed on the STAR Market
- Biren listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange
- Enflame STAR Market IPO accepted
- Kunlunxin, T-Head initiated listing processes
- TSINGMICRO, HardyVision and others advancing IPOs
Capitalization brings dual effects:
- ✅ Positive: Supports R&D and ecosystem building
- ⚠️ Negative: Valuation bubbles and revenue realization pressure
Trend 2: Capacity Becomes the Biggest Constraint Variable
The contradiction between explosive domestic AI chip demand and limited advanced-process capacity is sharpening:
| Vendor | Advanced-process capacity need | Actually obtained |
|---|---|---|
| Huawei Ascend | 15K wafers/month (7nm-class) | Priority guaranteed |
| SMIC total capacity | ~20K wafers/month (7nm-class) | — |
| Other vendors | ~5K wafers/month combined | Extremely tight |
Whether stable wafer capacity can be secured directly determines vendor survival. Cambricon's 75.4% inventory-to-revenue ratio is essentially a lock on capacity.
Trend 3: Competition Shifts from "Usable" to "Good"
Early competition focused on "can it run the model"; now it's about "runtime efficiency, deployment cost":
| Dimension | "Usable" era | "Good" era |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware performance | Can it run the model | Runtime efficiency, energy efficiency |
| Software stack | Basic adaptation | Maturity, framework breadth |
| Ecosystem | Existence | Developer community activity |
| Deployment cost | Insensitive | Core competitive factor |
V. H2 2026 Outlook
5.1 Upcoming Key Events
| Time | Event | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 Q3 | NVIDIA Rubin architecture details revealed | Next-gen flagship specs unveiled |
| 2026 Q3 | Huawei Ascend 950PR/950DT formally launched | New benchmark for domestic inference chips |
| 2026 Q4 | AMD MI350X scaled delivery | NVIDIA Blackwell competitor |
| 2026 Q4 | Cambricon Siyuan 690 launch (est.) | New-gen training chip |
| 2027 Q1 | NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra delivery | New compute benchmark lands |
5.2 Key Competitive Factors Over the Next Three Years
- Wafer capacity access: Advanced-process capacity is a scarce resource; vendors tied to SMIC and TSMC have inherent advantages
- Capital operation efficiency: The IPO window is limited; raising enough capital on the market determines R&D sustainability
- Software ecosystem depth: Hardware performance is only the entry ticket; software stack maturity, framework adaptation breadth, and developer community activity are the core moat
VI. Conclusion: A Diverse Ecosystem Will Eventually Form
In H1 2026, the AI chip industry is undergoing a historic transition from "one dominant player" to "pluralistic coexistence."
- NVIDIA builds higher training barriers with Blackwell Ultra while laying out inference efficiency via the Groq acquisition
- Huawei Ascend holds the domestic compute baseline with full-stack capability; 950PR begins to surpass H20 in inference
- Cambricon proves the commercial viability of domestic AI chips by turning profitable first; Siyuan 590 surpasses international rivals in specific scenarios
- Cerebras, Taalas and other inference-specific chip companies opened a "non-GPU" third route
- TSINGMICRO's reconfigurable architecture provides a diversified technical route choice for China's AI chips
Over the next three years, the domestic AI chip endgame will form a pluralistic ecosystem where GPU, ASIC, and reconfigurable computing three technical routes coexist, with cloud and edge developing in coordination. "Domestic substitution" is no longer a slogan, but an industrial reality happening now.
Data sources:
- Xinchuang World "2026 China Domestic AI Chip Vendor Capability Quadrant" (2026-06-16)
- TrendForce "The Era of Inference Economy: The Rules of AI Chips Are Being Rewritten" (2026-06-04)
- RayByte "Compute Doubles! NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra Chip Launched" (2026-06-02)
- Official financial reports and announcements of each company
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