In July 2025, China's chip industry staged a stunning counterattack that shook the world: after a ten-year blockade by the United States, it was completely overturned by a "pure-blooded Chinese chip"! The Loongson 3C6000 server chip has emerged out of the blue, with performance approaching that of Intel's top Xeon processors. It has also developed a completely independent instruction system with 566 patents, fundamentally breaking the technological shackles of the United States.
Meanwhile, China's chip exports soared to 542.7 billion yuan, while imports plunged by 350 billion yuan. Companies like Huawei, SMIC, and CXPT broke through the iron curtain of Western blockades with their cutting-edge technologies.
The release of the Loongson 3C6000 series server chips marks China's first "pure blood autonomy" in the field of core computing power. This chip is developed based on the self-developed instruction set LoongArch and does not require any overseas technology authorization. It is equipped with a hardware-level security mechanism to completely eliminate the risk of backdoors. Test data from the China Electronics Standardization Institute shows that its overall performance has reached the level of Intel's third-generation Xeon chips in 2023, reducing the generation gap between server chips in China and the United States from over ten years to three to four years.
The IPO applications of Moore Threads and Muxi Co., Ltd. on the STAR Market were accepted at the end of June 2025, with plans to raise 8 billion yuan and 3.9 billion yuan respectively for the research and development of AI chips. The MTTS4000 computing card of Moore Threads supports the training of fully open-source large models in a thousand-card cluster, while the Xiyun C series GPU of Muxi has been applied in the national AI training ground. Another GPU company, Bitmain Technology, has turned to listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Its BR100 series chips have a computing power three times that of NVIDIA's A100, but they have not yet entered mass production due to restrictions on TSMC's foundry services. Although the three enterprises have been placed on the Entity List by the United States, the fast track of the capital market indicates that China's support for hard technology is unprecedented.
In the field of memory chips, CXMT's 18-nanometer DDR5 memory has entered the global supply chain, with a monthly production capacity of 2.73 million pieces at its Hefei factory. With its 294-layer 3D NAND flash memory technology, Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd. has entered the first echelon of global memory chips and is competing on the same stage with Samsung and Micron. In the wafer fabrication plant of Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd. in Wuhan, the 24-hour operating assembly lines have raised production efficiency to the forefront of the industry.
Smic successfully mass-produced 7-nanometer chips through multiple exposure technology of DUV equipment without EUV lithography machines. Its revenue is expected to exceed 8 billion US dollars in 2024, with orders from global customers filling the production schedule, covering multiple markets such as Asia and Europe. China has already captured 35% of the global market share in mature 28-nanometer and above manufacturing processes, attracting companies like Tesla and Bosch to shift their supply chains to China through cost optimization.
Key progress has been made in the localization of semiconductor equipment. The full range of ion implanters from CETC Equipment has been applied to major domestic integrated circuit production lines. The shipment volume of 200mm chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) equipment has reached a new high, and the 300mm equipment has entered the verification stage of international mainstream production lines. In the field of materials, Jiangfeng Electronics' high-purity sputtering targets have been mass-produced at the 7-nanometer node, and its 5-nanometer process materials have entered the experimental stage.
The integrated RF baseband chip for short message communication of Beidou in smart phones jointly developed by China Electronics Technology Group Corporation has overcome the technology of rapid capture of weak signals, enabling ordinary mobile phones to directly connect to satellites and send information even when there is no ground network. This rice-grain-sized chip has been applied to domestic mobile phones, solving the communication problem of "not being in service areas".
China has implemented new regulations on the origin of chips, replacing the packaging location with the "tape-out location" as the criterion for determining tariffs. The 3-nanometer chips produced by TSMC's Arizona factory, which are taped out in the United States, need to pay a 125% tariff when entering the Chinese market, and their cost is 400% higher than that of SMIC's 7-nanometer chips. For this reason, TSMC has urgently expanded the 28-nanometer production capacity of its Nanjing factory, with a plan to add 40,000 wafers per month by 2025.
China has been promoting the ecological construction of the open-source instruction set architecture RISC-V, with a cumulative mass production of over 4 billion chips, accounting for more than 50% of the global RISC-V chip output. Huawei, Alibaba's Pingtouge and other enterprises have launched multiple RISC-V chips, covering fields such as the Internet of Things and AI. The China RISC-V Industry Alliance has over 600 members. It is expected that the ecosystem scale will exceed 100 billion yuan by 2025, forming a tripartite confrontation with ARM and x86.
Huada 9tian has achieved domestic substitution of 14-nanometer EDA tools, but for processes below 3 nanometers, it still relies on international giants. Huawei has launched the "Nanmudan Plan", reconfiguring 90% of its domestic supply chain, replacing 13,000 components and redesigning 4,000 circuit boards.
In July 2025, Anhui Wentian Quantum and Huazhong University of Science and Technology jointly released the first domestic chip-level post-quantum cryptographic card, which supports multiple anti-quantum attack algorithms and can be applied in key infrastructure fields such as finance and energy. This chip is compatible with traditional national cryptographic algorithms, enabling security functions such as digital signatures and key generation, and laying the groundwork in advance for information security in the era of quantum computing.
Although domestic AI chip enterprises such as Cambricon and Moore Threads are in a loss-making state due to high R&D investment, Cambricon's stock price rose nearly fourfold in 2024, and domestic AI chip clusters have already supported the training of large models with hundreds of billions of parameters. The computing power of Huawei's Ascend 910B chip reaches 320TFLOPS, approaching 80% of NVIDIA's A100, and it is used to train domestic large models such as DeepSeek R2.
In July 2025, EDA giants such as Siemens and Synopsys suddenly announced the lifting of export restrictions on design software to China. However, the lifting window is only 90 days, and the United States reserves the right to adjust it back at any time. Industry analysts point out that this move is a compromise of the United States in the rare earth game, but it attempts to lock China in a position in the industrial chain where "design is feasible but manufacturing is restricted".
