Huawei, Cambricon Lead Chinese AI Chipmakers Raising Prices 20-50% on HBM Shortage

Reuters reported September 10 that Huawei, Cambricon, MetaX, and Iluvatar CoreX have all raised prices on current and next-generation AI accelerators as a global shortage of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) squeezes the cost of building domestic alternatives to Nvidia. Huawei lifted the indicated price of its Ascend 950DT accelerator card to more than 250,000 yuan (~$37,255), up 20-50% from quotes given customers roughly two months earlier; its Ascend 950PR rose from about 60,000 yuan at the start of 2026 to more than 80,000 yuan, and the older Ascend 910C board climbed from roughly 90,000 yuan to more than 110,000 yuan. Cambricon raised prices on its planned 690 chip by 20-30%. December 2024 US export controls on advanced HBM to China have pushed Chinese chipmakers toward grey-market channels where HBM costs several times international prices, since memory is a large share of finished accelerator cost. The price increases complicate Beijing's push to scale domestic AI chip alternatives even as demand from DeepSeek, ByteDance, and other buyers accelerates.