MetaX scales production to meet rising AI chip demand

Chinese GPU maker MetaX Integrated Circuits is racing to scale production as "domestic AI computing demand far exceeds supply", with customer orders already stretching well into next year, said the company's co-founder and chief technology officer Peng Li.

Peng made the comments during an interview on Wednesday in Shanghai.

While the market demand is extremely large and urgent, domestic AI computing power is still in short supply, especially the "high-quality, general-purpose, easy-to-use, stable and reliable" computing power.

She noted that some perceived oversupply comes from chips that are not built on general-purpose architectures and can only run specific or older-generation models — making them unsuitable for the diverse workloads required by modern data centers.

In terms of the GPU architecture, Peng emphasized that chip design must seek balance among computing power, memory bandwidth, and interconnect capability.

Key technologies such as optical interconnects, advanced packaging, heat dissipation, and power delivery are all advancing rapidly, and that Zhangjiang in the eastern part of Shanghai— where MetaX is headquartered — has gathered many of China's leading innovators in these areas, according to Peng.

As China has prioritized AI infrastructure and industrial applications in the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30), China's AI iteration cycles will be on a fast track given the country's competitiveness in rich data, diverse application scenarios and a strong industrial chain, according to Peng.

Founded in 2020, MetaX went public on the technology-focused STAR Market at the Shanghai bourse in December. Its products cover four major areas of AI inference, cloud-based AI training, graphics rendering and 3D applications, as well as scientific computing.

According to MetaX's senior vice-president Sun Guoliang, the MXC600 series, the company's flagship AI training and inference chip built on a fully domestic supply chain, has entered mass production and is "the main product for 2026".

Orders for several other product lines have already been booked through next year and beyond, he added.

To maintain its supply chain security, MetaX launched a multi-source supply guarantee mechanism three years prior to meet China's large-model training and inference needs even in extreme conditions, said Sun.

To further strengthen its intellectual property position, the company has filed over 1,000 core invention patents across 14 categories, covering chip architecture, hardware-software co-optimization and domestic supply chain adaptations, he added.