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Company Trend（June 23）

Kuaishou has spun off its internal chip division into an independent entity, Lingchuan Technology, which has completed a Series A+ funding round raising several hundred million RMB, marking a full transition of its self-developed chip business toward independent market-oriented operations. Lingchuan Technology was formally established as an independent company in March 2024, jointly controlled by Kuaishou and a Beijing AI fund, focusing on the development of dedicated compute chips for video processing and multimodal large models. Its flagship mature product SL200 has shipped nearly 100,000 units, covering 99.7% of Kuaishou’s live-streaming transcoding workloads and supporting video traffic for approximately 700 million platform users. The chip is also supplied to external customers including Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Cloud, and Bilibili. The SL200 has reportedly won international video encoding competitions for three consecutive years, delivering higher compression efficiency than comparable Nvidia solutions while reducing compute energy consumption by approximately 30%. A next-generation fully domestic 3D-stacked chip completed tape-out in April 2026. The new funding will be used for product iteration, capacity expansion of existing chips, and overseas market development. Leveraging its internet-scale application scenarios, Lingchuan Technology is also deploying hardware solutions including AI acceleration cards and integrated compute appliances, targeting use cases in intelligent computing, security, and automotive applications. The company is emerging as a key domestic supplier in China’s vertical video compute chip segment.

South Korean authorities have confirmed that the completion timeline for SK Hynix’s fourth wafer fab in the Yongin semiconductor cluster has been significantly advanced from 2044 to 2034, a full 10-year acceleration. The Yongin cluster is planned to include four wafer fabs and represents one of South Korea’s largest semiconductor investment projects in recent years. Previously, SK Hynix had already brought forward the timeline for the cluster’s first fab, which is now scheduled to begin production in February 2027, three months earlier than originally planned. According to The Elec, SK Hynix has disclosed to key suppliers a plan to double its DRAM capacity — from approximately 550,000 wafers per month currently to 1 million wafers per month by 2030. The expansion will be heavily concentrated in the Yongin cluster, with Phase 1 alone expected to add about 360,000 wafers per month of capacity in the first half of 2030.

Comment: SK Hynix’s decision to bring forward the completion timeline of its fourth fab in the Yongin semiconductor cluster by 10 years marks a clear acceleration in the expansion cycle of global memory leaders, shifting from a gradual capacity build-out to an aggressive supply expansion phase. This move is driven by a structural supply-demand imbalance in the HBM market, where the current gap is estimated at approximately 40%–50%, and the combined HBM capacity of major suppliers for 2026 has already been fully pre-sold. With AI model training requiring 5–10 times more compute intensity than traditional workloads, HBM has effectively evolved from an optional component into a critical “oxygen supply” layer for AI compute systems.

Comment: This round of analog chip price increases marks a structural shift in the industry cycle from inventory destocking to a tight supply-demand equilibrium, with underlying drivers extending far beyond simple cost transmission. Price increases are driven by three structural forces: 1) Continuous contraction of 8-inch wafer capacity at the upstream level, as TSMC and Samsung shift resources toward advanced nodes and AI chips, resulting in constrained supply of mature-node capacity that analog semiconductors rely on. 2) The surge in AI computing demand is driving strong growth in analog devices such as power management and signal chain products, significantly increasing analog chip value content per vehicle and per server. 3) Rising prices of key raw materials such as gold, silver, and copper, combined with increasing global energy and logistics costs, are forming a dual-driven structure of cost-push and demand-pull dynamics.

Onsemi announced that it will acquire Synaptics in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately USD 7bn, marking the largest acquisition in the company’s history.

Recently, National Silicon Industry Group announced that it and its major shareholder Shanghai Guosheng Group have completed a total RMB 11.448bn capital increase in its core subsidiary Zing Semiconductor Corporation. The full amount will be invested in a capacity upgrade project for high-end 12-inch semiconductor silicon wafers, marking the formal implementation of this RMB 10bn-level capital increase.

The capital injection consists of two funding channels. The listed company will contribute equity interests in three of its silicon wafer business entities, valued at RMB 7.448bn, while Guosheng Group will provide RMB 4bn in cash. After the capital increase, Zing Semiconductor’s registered capital will expand significantly, while the listed company will continue to maintain absolute control. Zing Semiconductor is a core domestic mass-production platform for 300mm silicon wafers, with current monthly capacity of 850,000 wafers. Supported by the new funding, the company will expand production bases in both Shanghai and Taiyuan, increasing capacity for polished wafers and epitaxial wafers.

Recently, Prinano’s self-developed PL-AS vacuum pneumatic wafer-level nanoimprint lithography system completed commercial delivery. The equipment has been deployed on a photonic chip production line in Shenzhen and passed mass-production validation on 8-inch wafers, marking China’s breakthrough from Japan’s long-standing monopoly and a technological leap in the nanoimprint lithography sector.

Nanoimprint lithography is a core patterning technology for photonic chips and LiDAR devices. Previously, the global market for mass-production nanoimprint equipment had been exclusively dominated by Canon. The domestically developed system adopts a full-area vacuum pneumatic surface-pressure architecture, creating a generational advantage over Canon’s step-and-repeat small-field imprinting approach. The domestic equipment achieves resolution below 10nm, outperforming Canon’s 14nm limit. Its full-wafer pressure uniformity error is below 0.5%, while residual layer thickness variation is controlled within 2nm, helping avoid alignment errors and yield losses caused by Canon’s multi-step imprinting process.

In terms of mass-production efficiency, the domestic system can complete full-wafer imprinting in a single step, more than doubling throughput compared with Canon’s equipment. The overall process bypasses DUV lithography, reducing photonic chip manufacturing costs to only one-tenth of traditional optical lithography solutions, while significantly lowering equipment operation, maintenance, and consumables expenses. The entire equipment system, photoresist, and template process have achieved domestic self-reliance and controllability, supporting mass production of silicon photonics and OPA automotive LiDAR chips.

U.S. semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis said in an in-depth report that ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China’s leading DRAM manufacturer, is expected to overtake Micron by the end of 2026 and become the world’s third-largest DRAM supplier. CXMT reported revenue of RMB 50.8bn in the first quarter of 2026, up 719.13% YoY. SemiAnalysis expects the company’s full-year revenue to exceed USD 50bn. Its profitability was also remarkable, with a profit margin of approximately 70% in the first quarter. In 2025, CXMT achieved annual profitability for the first time, posting net profit of RMB 1.875bn and a gross margin of 41.02%. In terms of capacity, CXMT is expected to reach monthly production capacity of 350,000 12-inch-equivalent wafers by the end of 2026 and increase this to 500,000 wafers by 2028. Its share of the global DRAM market is projected to rise from 11% in 2025 to approximately 17%. Data released by Counterpoint Research on the same day showed that CXMT’s DRAM market share had increased from 3% last year to 8% in the first quarter of this year, while the overall DRAM market expanded 80% QoQ and 260% YoY.