The use of chips for artificial intelligence (AI) and electric vehicles (EVs) will offer strong demand underpinning the development of China’s semiconductor industry, according to veterans of the sector at an annual gathering in Shanghai. At the 2025 Global Semiconductor Market Summit, chip executives discussed the industry’s future amid U.S.-China tech rivalry and surging demand for chips, as well as different technology trajectories. The two-day event, which wrapped up on November 14, was organized by the World Integrated Circuit Association. AI chips, memory chips and automotive chips have become the main drivers of growth for the domestic chip-design sector thanks to the global AI frenzy and China’s booming EV industry, said Wu Jian, Vice Secretary General of Jiangsu Semiconductor Industry Association, at the event. Jiangsu is a key base for the country’s semiconductor design and production facilities. Wu said the key chokepoint for China’s advanced chipmaking industry was scattered chip production.
While China had around 189 production lines to process wafers, the combined capacity was just over 6 million wafers per month, with the average capacity per line trailing far behind advanced global players such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and SK Hynix, Wu said. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the country’s total output of integrated circuits (ICs) expanded 10.2% in the first 10 months of 2025 to 386.6 billion units. In October alone, the output expanded 17.7% from a year earlier to 41.8 billion units. Meanwhile, China imported 493.8 billion ICs in the first 10 months, an increase of 8.5% from a year earlier, according to Customs data. As China is denied access to the most advanced chips from Nvidia and fabs run by TSMC, the country is betting on a new chip structure, namely RISC-V, to empower its chip industry.
With the surge in AI applications, RISC-V chips are expected to become the main workhorse in operating systems for large language models (LLMs), said Liu Shuai, Chief Marketing Officer at Beijing Eswin Computing Technology, which focuses on the design of RISC-V chips, at the forum. Liu said RISC-V chips were the “best choice for the AI era”, thanks to their high power efficiency. He predicted RISC-V would become the “mainstream chip architecture” over the next three to five years, with wide adoption in data centers and smart devices. RISC-V, the fifth generation of the open-sourced Reduced Instruction Set Computer architecture for processors, is free for anyone to use and modify and is one of China’s best hopes for achieving chip self-sufficiency.
Siemens EDA, the U.S.-based giant in electronic design automation (EDA) software – the tools used to design chips – said it would continue its commitment to the auto chips sector. Actel Niu, Director of Siemens EDA’s China business, said the company was updating software to meet changing demands from carmakers, as “software will define the concept of vehicles” in the future. Siemens, along with U.S. companies Cadence and Synopsys, dominated China’s EDA market with a combined share of 82% last year, the South China Morning Post reports.
Meanwhile, Huawei’s advanced data center architecture powered by its Ascend chips topped the biennial ranking of the Shenzhen-based company’s latest inventions. Initially launched as the CloudMatrix 384, the Scale-Up Ultra-Large-Scale computing system was described by Huawei and Chinese artificial intelligence infrastructure start-up SiliconFlow in a paper as a specialized “AI supernode” that is purpose-built for handling extensive AI workloads. Originally designed with 384 Ascend 910C neural processing units and 192 Kunpeng server central processing units, which are interconnected through a unified bus providing ultra-high bandwidth and low latency, the system can support up to tens of thousands of interconnected chips to train and run AI models, according to Huawei executives at the company’s sixth Innovation and IP Forum in Beijing. The top invention integrated innovations in hardware, software and architecture, according to Sun Hongwei, Huawei’s Chief Computing Software Architect. Sun said his team tackled plenty of challenges to maintain reliability, power supply and data storage for large computing systems.
Huawei also presented its next-generation solid-state storage drives (SSDs) that feature high capacity, high performance and improved reliability, which are capabilities increasingly required in AI development projects. Explosive data growth in the AI era had led to a so-called capacity wall, so improved storage capacity was a major focus for Huawei, according to Zhang Ji, Huawei's Manager of Data Storage Applications. Huawei's innovative integration of chip packaging and system design enabled the new SSD’s development. Alan Fan, Huawei’s head of intellectual property rights, said the company, which holds a total of more than 150,000 active patents as of 2024, generated more than USD630 million in patent licensing last year. In 2024, Huawei’s total research and development (R&D) spending reached CNY179.7 billion, equivalent to 20.8% of its total revenue. Meanwhile, total research and development investments over the past decade had exceeded CNY1.24 trillion, the South China Morning Post reports.
