Technology Author：Dixuan Lu Jun 23, 2020 07:07 PM (GMT+8)

The capital-hungry chipmaker is expected to raise CNY 2.8 billion with this listing.

Cambricon MLU220. Image Credit: Cambricon Website.

Chinese AI chip unicorn Cambricon, which filed an IPO prospectus in March 2020, has passed the market watchdog's review and is planning to kick off trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange Star Market in July.

According to the company's spokespeople, the funds raised will be used for new projects, including new-generation chips for AI training and inference used in data centers.

Cambricon and SMIC's successful registration on the tech board mirrors the importance the domestic investors and China's central government are attaching to the local semiconductor industry.

The R&D cost of chip-design companies is traditionally high. Although CNY 2.8 billion that the Beijing-based startup is planning to raise can support it in the short term, the company needs to extend its customer base to replace Huawei, which used to be its largest customer before it started building IP for System-on-a-Chip (SoC) series Kirin in-house.