China’s AI inference chip race keeps minting nine-figure rounds. The latest reportedly belongs to Sunrise, a chipmaker carved out of SenseTime’s semiconductor business, which has collected RMB2B ($280M) at a post-money valuation near RMB20B ($2.8B).
The financing would nearly double the company’s valuation from its previous round, according to a report published on August 28 and carried by TechNode. Sunrise has not confirmed the deal.
Sunrise builds processors for AI inference, the compute-heavy stage of running trained models. It is one of several Chinese chip startups racing to offer domestic alternatives for large-scale model deployment as export controls squeeze access to Nvidia hardware.
The new capital is expected to fund product expansion and commercial operations as the company scales its inference lineup. SenseTime, the Hong Kong-listed company best known for computer vision, split off the chip effort to give the unit room to raise external money.
The reported round underlines how much capital is flowing into China’s AI chip supply chain even as model makers battle for export markets. Inference silicon has become a crowded field, and Sunrise’s valuation gain signals investors are willing to pay up for domestic compute options.
