Chinese Chipmakers Celebrate $1.5B Server Tenders from China Unicom, ICBC

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Chinese semiconductor manufacturers are seeing significant gains as state-owned companies like China Unicom and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China launch server tenders valued at nearly 11 billion yuan (about 1.5 billion USD). Industry insiders reported that most of these contracts are being awarded to domestic suppliers.

China Unicom’s recent annual centralized bid for general-purpose servers, worth around 7.96 billion yuan (approximately 1.1 billion USD), was distributed among 11 manufacturers. Meanwhile, Inspur Electronic Information Industry secured the entire 3 billion yuan (roughly 421 million USD) server project for ICBC.

All servers supplied to ICBC will utilize locally-made Hygon processors instead of foreign chips, a source from Inspur, based in Beijing, revealed. For China Unicom’s project, one package valued at approximately 895 million yuan (around 125.6 million USD) was explicitly for servers equipped with Intel central processing units. The remaining winning bids went to suppliers utilizing domestically-developed chips.

Overall, out of the nearly 11 billion yuan in contracts, about 10 billion yuan were allocated to servers powered by Chinese-made chips, highlighting the rapid growth of China’s chip industry. Leading the charge are companies like Hygon Information Technology and Huawei Technologies.

An industry expert pointed out that “Chinese chip companies have made tremendous progress in recent years, thanks to robust policy support.” The country’s chipmakers are expanding quickly and establishing a solid presence in the market. For instance, Bank of Nanjing recently issued a server tender that exclusively required servers powered by Hygon chips.

Sales at a major local server supplier, which incorporates Huawei’s Kunpeng and Ascend chips, have surged from a few hundred million yuan (tens of millions of USD) to over 10 billion yuan in just a few years, according to a company executive.

“The main drivers of this growth are the financial and internet sectors,” he explained. Over the past four years, the company’s server sales to financial institutions increased twentyfold to reach 6 billion yuan (about 842 million USD), while orders from telecom operators jumped from zero to another 6 billion yuan.

Currently, Huawei’s Kunpeng chips dominate approximately 70 percent of China’s domestic server chip market, with Hygon chips accounting for the remaining 30 percent. Although global giants like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia still lead markets worldwide, with strong ecosystems, Chinese chip makers see new opportunities, especially through increased adoption by state-owned enterprises and the advancement of artificial intelligence technologies.

A senior executive from a Chinese chip manufacturing firm expressed optimism, saying, “We will continue to work diligently to expand our market share.”