Founding investor in China’s leading AI chip firm Cambricon dumps almost all of its stake as losses mount
- SDIC Venture Capital Management Co sold 7.4 million shares, or 99.98 per cent of its total stake
- Several other early investors have cashed out this year, including the VC arms of China Merchants Bank and Alibaba
A founding investor in Cambricon Technologies, one of China’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) chip firms, has dumped nearly all of its equity stake in the Shanghai-listed company as losses mount amid economic headwinds and an industry downturn.
SDIC Venture Capital Management Co sold 7.4 million shares, or 99.98 per cent of its total stake, in Cambricon for a total of 1.48 billion yuan (US$203 million) between March to June this year, according to a Shanghai Stock Exchange filing by the company dated September 23.
SDIC Venture Capital, the venture capital arm established in 2016 by State Development and Investment Corporation, the largest state-owned investment holding company in China, manages a fund of around 30 billion yuan, according to its website.
The stake was acquired before Cambricon held a high-profile IPO that raised 2.8 billion yuan on Shanghai’s tech-focused Star Market in July 2020. As of the end of 2022, SDIC Venture Capital was Cambricon’s fourth-largest shareholder, according to Cambricon’s financial report.
Cambricon shares dropped 3.3 per cent to 126.13 yuan on Monday. Its shares have almost halved from a high of 281.5 yuan when it went public in July 2020, although they have risen this year on the rise of AI-driven chat bots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which run on high-performance AI chips.