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Chen Tianshi just pulled off one of the wildest wealth jumps in the tech industry, and it happened because Washington slammed China out of the high‑end chip market.
The decision forced Beijing to build its own supply chain, which pushed the 39‑year‑old founder of Cambricon Technologies from struggling researcher to a $23 billion force in the global AI race.
The data comes from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which tracked how fast his net worth exploded after U.S. restrictions reshaped who gets to sell what in China.
Back in 2019, Chen Tianshi was nowhere near billionaire status. His startup was only three years old, and Huawei, which made up more than 95% of Cambricon’s revenue, suddenly walked away to build its own chips.
That collapse nearly wiped the company out. But when the U.S. blocked China from buying advanced processors and Beijing ordered state and private players to “buy local,” the same system that crushed him handed him a lifeline.
The shift built a protected market that funneled business straight into his hands and backed his company with heavy state support.
Tracking how Cambricon soaked up demand
Over the past 24 months, Cambricon’s stock jumped more than 765%. Chen Tianshi owns 28% of the company, which pushed his personal fortune above $22.5 billion since January. That jump made him the third‑richest person in the world aged 40 or under, right behind Lukas Walton and Mark Mateschitz.
Brokerage notes also flagged Cambricon’s new Siyuan 690 chip, even though analysts say it still trails Nvidia’s closest equivalent by a few years.
The real rocket fuel arrived in August, when Beijing told local companies to stop using Nvidia’s H20 chips for government work. Cambricon’s stock and Chen Tianshi’s wealth took off instantly.
The company had to put out a filing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange to cool investors down, reminding everyone that it still sits under U.S. sanctions and is dealing with a steep technology gap.
The filing also shot down rumors about upcoming products that don’t exist.
Shen Meng at Chanson & Co. said Cambricon’s rapid growth came from “a low starting point” and that its valuation may not hold if policy support ever softens.
And Sunny Cheung at the Jamestown Foundation believes that neither Cambricon nor Huawei is close to becoming “China’s Nvidia,” pointing out that Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem takes years to copy, according to Bloomberg.
Chen Tianshi has come a long way from campus labs to a national market
Chen’s story is tied directly to China’s state‑run academic machine. Born in 1985 in Nanchang to a father who worked as an electrical engineer and a mother who taught history, he was pushed into a gifted program early.
According to his Wikipedia page, Chen studied at the University of Science and Technology of China, earned his PhD in 2010, and joined the Chinese Academy of Sciences with his older brother Chen Yunji.
The pair gained attention in 2014 with academic work on their DianNao accelerator. By 2015, they built their first deep‑learning chip. They named it Cambricon after the Cambrian explosion.
In 2016, the project became a company with backing from the academy. The big commercial win came in 2017, when Huawei used Cambricon chips to boost the camera and gaming features of the Mate 10.
That deal ended in 2019, and Cambricon moved from consumer devices to cloud and edge hardware.
Cambricon listed on Shanghai’s Sci‑Tech Innovation Board in 2020, and it stayed unprofitable until the final quarter of 2024, when it finally posted its first positive earnings. The U.S. then placed the firm on the entity list in 2022, limiting access to top American tech.
Then Washington tightened restrictions again last year by banning Nvidia and AMD from selling high‑performance AI chips to China, which created a supply vacuum, so Beijing responded by ordering companies to buy domestic hardware.
Revenue surged by 500% over the past year. Chen Tianshi still competes with Huawei and a new wave of Chinese chip startups, but the market is large enough to keep all of them busy… well at least for now.
Shuman Ghosemajumder at Reken said Cambricon’s rise is tied to the global scramble for AI hardware and warned that volatility is part of the game.
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