China’s full-stack AI chipmaker Sunrise has recently secured 1 billion yuan ($139.3 million) in its latest funding round to consolidate its market share in the home-grown advanced graphics processing unit (GPU) sector.
The round was participated by a fund under China’s heavy equipment firm SANY Group; Chinese AI firm Fourth Paradigm Technology; and video game developer Yoozoo Games, according to a company release.
Other investors include Chinese venture capital investment firm Green Pine Capital Partners; and HT Capital, the private equity arm of Guotai Haitong Securities, which was formed after the merger of two Chinese brokerages Guotai Junan Securities and Haitong Securities in March.
Sunrise is led by co-CEOs Wang Zhan, who joined Chinese Internet giant Baidu in 2000 and was a key driver of Baidu’s commercial product developments; and Wang Yong, who previously headed the chip R&D department at Chinese AI software firm SenseTime and was involved in the development of Baidu’s self-developed kunlun chips.
Wang was reportedly dismissed by Baidu in April 2016 citing violation of professional ethics, according to Chinese local news outlet Jiemian.
Spun off from SenseTime’s chip department at the end of 2024, Shanghai-based Sunrise plans to use the proceeds in self-developed chip R&D, as well as market and team expansion, per the release.
The rise of Sunrise comes amid China’s ambitious efforts in growing the country’s computing power capacity as it serves as the backbone of AI innovation. China’s aggregate computing power is expected to hit 1,037.3 exaflops (EFLOPS) in 2025, up 43% from the 725.3 EFLOPS recorded in 2024, according to a report by research firm International Data Corporation (IDC)
An EFLOP, or exaflop, is a unit of computing speed equivalent to one quintillion floating-point operations per second. This measurement is commonly used to gauge the performance of high-end computer systems, particularly supercomputers that are often employed in complex tasks such as artificial intelligence computations.
