China AI chip fabless: Supply-demand gap catalyzes substitution, training market is the next frontier

Research evidence excerpt

China AI chip fabless: Supply-demand gap catalyzes substitution, training market is the next frontier

Asia Pacific Equity Research

09 July 2026

China AI chip fabless

Supply-demand gap catalyzes substitution, training

market is the next frontier

Ahead of the landmark WAIC 2026 (Jul 17-20, 2026), we hosted a small tour Technology

to visit domestic GPU vendors in Shanghai. Our key takeaways are: 1) AC Billy Feng

demand/supply shortages are catalyzing the adoption of domestic AI chips, 2) (86-21) 6106 6359

key players are fine-tuning new locally produced chips with comparable billy.feng@jpmorgan.com

performance to NVIDIA's Hopper series, and 3) the next unprecedented SAC Registration Number: S1730520030005

market opportunity lies in training (or post-training at early stage), following Ri Xu

the proven commercial application in inference. Iluvatar CoreX is our top pick (86-21) 6106 6318

among domestic AI chip fabless names, we rate it OW with a Jun-27 price ri.xu@jpmchase.com

target of HK$920.0. SAC Registration Number: S1730522100001

J.P. Morgan Securities (China) Company

Limited

• Upbeat demand to propel product pipeline. Owing to low visibility in

accessing overseas chips, we believe CSP customers will enlarge budget

allocations to domestic AI chips. On top of explosive AI token consumption,

design wins and qualification lead times for local chips could accelerate

meaningfully. On the supply side, secured capacity remains the key

bottleneck in the near term, however we expect 2H26 to be a critical

juncture to assess the competitiveness of domestic AI chip vendors, as tape-

outs at local foundries are drawing to a close. Specifically, Iluvatar CoreX

plans to debut its new Tiangai 300 chip (link) at WAIC 2026, with small-