Moore Threads' revenue jumped 147% as China bets heavily on homegrown GPUs.

China's answer to Nvidia just posted numbers to back up the hype: first-half revenue beat all of last year combined, and the company recorded its first quarterly profit.

Moore Threads, the Beijing chipmaker widely cast as China's Nvidia alternative, booked 1.736 billion yuan (about $257 million) in revenue for the first half of 2026, up 147.42% from a year earlier. That already tops everything the company sold in all of 2025. Gross profit came in at 989 million yuan, up 103.78%. Net losses attributable to shareholders narrowed by 95.73%, according to a report from the Shanghai Stock Exchange's Global Times service. In the first quarter alone, the company posted a net profit of 29.4 million yuan, compared with a loss of 112.5 million yuan a year earlier, the South China Morning Post reported.

That is a real swing, not a rounding error.

A year ago the company was burning cash. Now its losses have narrowed sharply after a profitable first quarter, driven by GPU sales within China at a time when buying Nvidia chips has become complicated for reasons unrelated to price.

Moore Threads attributes the jump to two factors: demand for what it calls "full-function" GPUs, and faster rollout of its Kuae computing clusters, which bundle its chips into rentable AI infrastructure. The company's flagship MTT S5000 has been deployed at large scale in Beijing, Wuxi and Hangzhou, among other cities. R&D spending rose as well, up 38.16% to 769 million yuan in the first half. That suggests the company is not simply riding a one-off surge in demand and is still investing heavily in closing the gap with Nvidia's architecture.

Moore Threads only listed on Shanghai's STAR Market on December 5 of last year, raising nearly 8 billion yuan. On its debut day the stock closed 425% higher at 600.50 yuan a share, the biggest first-day gain by a major Chinese IPO since market reforms in 2019. Investors were not betting on a hypothetical. Their wager was that Washington's export restrictions on Nvidia's China-bound chips, combined with Beijing's push for semiconductor self-sufficiency, would leave Chinese cloud providers, banks and AI labs little choice but to buy local, whether or not they liked the hardware.

That bet is now showing up in hard revenue, not just stock-price enthusiasm, which matters. Much of China's domestic chip story so far has rested on subsidies and state procurement mandates rather than genuine commercial demand. A company that doubles and triples quarterly sales while narrowing losses toward actual profit offers a different kind of evidence.

There is a catch, and it still shapes who can realistically use this hardware. Moore Threads built its own software stack, MUSA, as a parallel to Nvidia's CUDA. The company insists MUSA was developed independently and does not depend on CUDA. However, it also ships a tool called MUSIFY, designed specifically to port existing CUDA code to MUSA. That is a tacit acknowledgment of the problem many assume: most AI software in the world was written for Nvidia's ecosystem, and migrating it still involves friction rather than a one-click switch. Every developer who has spent years optimizing for CUDA must decide whether porting is worth the effort, and that calculation is likely to shift only once Nvidia chips become hard enough to obtain.

The timing lines up closely with Beijing's regulatory moves. On October 16, China's Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology published a draft proposal to restrict exports of 23 AI-related technologies. These include core technology behind large language models with at least two trillion parameters, the scale reached by models such as Kimi K3 and Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max. The draft would cover model weights, checkpoints and source code, while API and app access would be left untouched, so people outside China could still use services such as DeepSeek. It signals that Beijing now views its frontier AI stack, spanning chips and models, as a set of strategic assets worth protecting, not just products to build.

None of this has made Chinese chip stocks an easy trade. The STAR50 Index fell about 40% in less than four months, erasing roughly $480 billion in market value, Reuters reported on October 26. Moore Threads and fellow chipmaker MetaX have each lost close to half their value since July. That volatility is the real story alongside the revenue figures. Investors clearly still believe in the long-term thesis; what they are repricing is how fast and how cheaply it will actually play out.

Revenue growth alone cannot settle the central question. Strong domestic sales show that Chinese buyers will choose Moore Threads over Nvidia when they have to. They do not yet show that the company can compete on performance or software maturity when that choice is genuinely free rather than forced. For now, though, 147% revenue growth and a first profitable quarter are not small achievements for a company that went public only eleven months ago.