A Chinese flag is displayed next to a “Made in China” sign seen on a printed circuit board with semiconductor chips, in this illustration picture taken February 17, 2023.
Florence Lo | Reuters
Revenue from China’s top chip equipment makers surged in the first half of the year, research released Thursday showed, as Beijing continues to aim for self-reliance for its semiconductor industry.
The top 10 domestic equipment manufacturers logged revenue of around 16.2 billion Chinese yuan ($2.2 billion) in the first half of the year, up 39% year-on-year, according to Shanghai-based CINNO Research.
Semiconductors — critical components that go into everything from smartphones to satellites — have been caught up in the broader technology battle between the U.S. and China.
Washington has sought to use export restrictions to cut off Beijing from key semiconductor equipment and technologies.
The chip supply chain is incredibly complex and made up of numerous companies, ranging from sellers for design tools for semiconductors to firms involved in manufacturing and relevant machinery.
China’s domestic semiconductor industry has previously heavily relied on foreign companies for these tools, leaving Beijing’s industry behind the likes of the U.S., South Korea and Taiwan.
Since 2019, U.S. sanctions on Chinese technology firms such as Huawei and China’s biggest chipmaker SMIC, has forced Beijing to boost its domestic industry and seek more self-reliance and wean itself off foreign technology.
That has underpinned the boost in revenues for China’s domestic chip equipment manufacturing firms.
CINNO names Naura Technology Group Co. as the top Chinese semiconductor equipment maker by revenue. The company produces tools required in the chip manufacturing process. Naura operating revenue in the first half of they ear stood at more than 7 billion yuan, up 68% year-on-year and outpacing other companies, CINNO said.
The second-largest Chinese domestic player is Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc. China (AMEC), which makes machines required for the semiconductor manufacturing process. Revenue rose 28% year-on-year to 2.53 billion yuan in the first half of the year, CINNO said.
ACM Research is the third-biggest Chinese player. It makes cleaning and packaging equipment for semiconductors, with revenue surging 47% year-on-year in the first half of the year to 1.61 billion yuan.
Still, China lacks access to some of the most advanced chipmaking tools around. For example, Dutch firm ASML makes a chipmaking tool called an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine — one of the costly instruments required to make the most advanced chips around. But ASML has been restricted by the Dutch government from exporting these machines to China.
Those restrictions, in addition to concerns about further tensions with the U.S., are one reason why Beijing has turned to its domestic firms. However, it appears China’s semiconductor industry is making some progress toward more advanced chips, even in the face of U.S. sanctions.
Huawei quietly launched a new smartphone this month, which can connect to next-generation 5G mobile networks, despite U.S. sanctions that aimed to cut the Chinese tech giant off from this technology. That’s thanks to a chip that appears to be manufactured by SMIC — which has surprised because it is a more advanced piece of technology than many had thought the company could produce.
The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.
Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.
Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.
Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.
“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”
Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.
Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.
Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.
Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.
Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.
The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.
Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.
The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.
The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.
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Bitcoin climbs above $112,000
On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.
While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.
Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.
Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:
Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.
Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.
The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.
“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.
In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.
“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.