Cambricon, one of China's main AI chip designers, doubled its revenue in the third quarter of 2026 and still fell far short of what analysts expected.
Sales reached 3.53B yuan against a forecast of 6.26B yuan, a gap of 2.73B yuan, or roughly 44% of the expected figure. Profit rose 148%. The company kept its 2026 target in place.
The backdrop is a supply squeeze. Chinese AI chipmakers face shortages of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the stacked memory that sits next to an AI processor and feeds it data. They also have limited access to advanced manufacturing, meaning the leading-edge factories that turn chip designs into silicon. A chip company can only sell what it can build, and both constraints cap output regardless of how many customers want the product.
That reading fits the numbers. Profit grew faster than revenue, which suggests the problem was volume rather than the economics of each chip sold. A company short on demand would more likely show weak sales and weak profit together. Analysts, by contrast, appear to have priced in a ramp that the supply chain could not deliver.
Holding the 2026 target also puts weight on the fourth quarter. Whether Cambricon can close that gap depends less on its own designs than on whether memory and manufacturing capacity loosen in the next few months, and both sit largely outside its control.