Chinese chip designers Cambricon Technologies and MetaX Integrated Circuits reported substantial growth in the first quarter, as the artificial intelligence boom, lingering US export-control risks and China’s self-sufficiency push drove the country’s demand for home-grown computing power.

Cambricon’s first-quarter revenue jumped 160 per cent from a year earlier to 2.89 billion yuan (US$423 million), while profit soared 185 per cent to 1 billion yuan, the company said in a filing on Wednesday.

Sometimes dubbed “little Nvidia” in China, the Beijing-based, Shanghai-listed company attributed its strong growth to a “sustained surge in the AI industry’s computing power demand”.

The company said last month that it planned to distribute a cash dividend of 15 yuan (US$2.20) for every 10 shares held, totalling more than 632 million yuan, after announcing in February that it had swung to a net profit of 2 billion yuan last year, following years of losses.

Shanghai-based MetaX said on Wednesday that its revenue for the first three months of the year grew 75 per cent from a year earlier to 561.9 million yuan. The company, which went public in December, reported a 98.8 million yuan net loss for the quarter.

MetaX, founded in 2020 by former engineers of US chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, attributed its increased revenue to significant growth in shipments of its graphics processing units (GPUs).