$1.4 Trillion Valuation: China’s Unicorn List Highlights Beijing’s Four Semiconductor Leaders

Longwall Strategy Consulting recently released the “GEI China Unicorn Enterprise Research Report 2026”. The report states that, for the period January‑July 2024, the integrated‑circuit industry—represented by compute and storage chips—recorded a year‑over‑year profit growth of 18.5 times. In 2025, China hosted 376 unicorn companies with a combined valuation exceeding $1.4 trillion, and hard‑tech enterprises accounted for more than 80 % of that total.

The ranking reveals that the semiconductor track has topped the unicorn popularity list for five consecutive years, overtaking traditional internet businesses to become the core battlefield for technology‑driven investment.

Beijing’s four semiconductor unicorns—Qingwei Intelligent, Kunlun Chip Technology, SMIC Beijing, and Yiswei Computing—collectively hold a valuation of over 1300 billion RMB and rank near the top of the list. Their business scopes cover wafer manufacturing, AI compute, and general‑purpose computing, forming a highly complementary domestic chip ecosystem.

SMIC Beijing leverages the mature SMIC production line to focus on 12‑inch high‑end wafer manufacturing, filling a gap in domestic advanced‑process capacity. Kunlun Chip, spun out of Baidu’s core chip team, has developed its own XPU architecture aimed at data‑center AI training and inference workloads. Yiswei Computing builds on a seasoned R&D team to advance RISC‑V cores for smart terminals and interconnect computing chips, with a planned Hong Kong IPO. Qingwei Intelligent distinguishes itself with a reconfigurable RPU architecture derived from Tsinghua University research, offering high compute efficiency and flexible deployment across scenarios such as data centers, space computing, AI mining, AIGC short‑video production, smart government, and digital education; it has already deployed more than 5000 petaflops of compute capacity nationwide.

These developments illustrate how the Chinese semiconductor sector has moved from single‑technology competition to diversified, high‑quality commercialization. Backed by both capital and industrial support, the industry is transitioning from “usable” chips to “excellent” chips, signaling a new phase of commercialized, high‑performance domestic semiconductor innovation.