The argument
The tape · quarterly coverage amplitude · live quarter blinking
Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation is China’s largest chip foundry, headquartered in Shanghai, and the company Beijing leans on hardest for the case that domestic chipmaking can substitute for what export controls withhold. It has traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as 0981.HK since 2004 and, since mid-2020, on Shanghai’s STAR Market as 688981.SS — a mainland listing Bloomberg described as a hedge against sanctions that had not yet arrived, four months before they did: a September 2020 Commerce Department order restricting exports to SMIC over an “unacceptable risk” of diversion to “military end use”, followed that December by SMIC’s addition to the formal US trade blacklist. SMIC has operated under that restriction for six years.
The business SMIC discloses on schedule keeps growing regardless. 2025 revenue reached US$9.33 billion, above 2024’s US$8.03 billion — SMIC’s own reported figures, in US dollars — and second-quarter 2026 revenue rose 20% from the first quarter to US$3.01 billion.
TEXXR’s record makes a distinction most coverage of SMIC doesn’t: between the chip node SMIC has actually shipped and everything explaining how it got there. The first is confirmed, repeatedly, by one method. The second almost never is.
The pattern starts in July 2022, when Dylan Patel’s teardown reported SMIC quietly shipping 7nm chips, calling it the world’s third-largest foundry behind TSMC and Samsung — a finding the Financial Times followed a month later by quoting Douglas Fuller, an academic who studies Chinese semiconductors, calling the yield “terrible” because SMIC lacked EUV lithography and was compensating with extra exposure passes. That single quote, from August 2022, is still the only yield estimate in TEXXR’s record. Nothing has updated it in four years.
The confirmation method repeats on a cadence: a new Huawei device, a teardown, a node claim. TechInsights’ analysis of the Mate 60 Pro found SMIC had fabricated its Kirin 9000s chip on a 7nm process in September 2023; later that month the Financial Times cautioned that DUV lithography, not EUV, meant the result was “progress” rather than a “breakthrough.” A month later, Bloomberg reported SMIC had used ASML DUV tools — older models ASML has not sold as EUV to China but that can reportedly be retooled — to produce it. TechInsights ran the same analysis on the next Mate phone in December 2024 and found the identical 7nm process, not the 5nm chip some had rumored — a stall, not an advance. In June 2025 it found the same chip in Huawei’s MateBook Fold laptop. It ran the analysis again in December 2025 and reported an “updated” 7nm process behind the Mate 80 Pro Max’s Kirin 9030. Four confirmations, one lab, one customer — never a word from SMIC itself.
Everything about how SMIC gets there stays a rumor. The Financial Times sourced a claim that SMIC planned to burn through its stockpile of US and Dutch equipment to build a 5nm Kirin chip in February 2024; Bloomberg sourced a separate claim that Applied Materials and Lam Research gear specifically had gone into the 7nm chip a month later. Applied Materials paid $252 million to settle Commerce Department allegations of illegal exports to SMIC in February 2026, yet neither sourced claim about SMIC’s specific equipment has had an on-record confirmation. In September 2025, the Financial Times reported SMIC was testing a domestically produced DUV machine — sourced to unnamed people, aimed at 7nm mass production by 2027. In March 2026, Reuters reported rival Hua Hong readying its own 7nm process with Huawei’s help — one story, but it generated eight separate edges on SMIC in TEXXR’s graph, all still unconfirmed seven months later. Even the March 2026 Iran allegation splits the same way: that the US formally sanctioned SMIC over alleged Chinese-military ties is confirmed; the underlying claim that SMIC actually shipped tools to Iran’s military, from senior Trump administration officials, is not.
The spectrogram
Signal decomposition · what the record is made of, by quarter · brightness = share of edges · drift = how far the story moved in meaning
In 2024Q1 the record was 50% regulatory; by 2026Q1 it is 57% financial. A price chart shows what a name did; the spectrogram shows what its story is made of.
The brains
The machine
TEXXR’s knowledge graph held 133 edges on SMIC when queried on 27 October. Financial edges lead at 45.1%, ordinary for a company that reports quarterly, but regulatory edges run second at 24.1% — combined, financial and regulatory account for 69.2% of everything the graph has recorded about SMIC, a higher regulatory share than ASML carries in its own 259-edge record (17.8%) or than TSMC’s latest 500-edge batch shows (8.4%). Between 2024’s first quarter (four edges) and 2026’s first quarter (17), SMIC’s regulatory share in the graph fell 50 percentage points while financial rose 32 and an entirely new competitor category — Hua Hong and other domestic rivals — appeared from nothing to 29%. That swing coincides with TEXXR’s 2026Q1 change in edge extraction, which introduced the competitor label, so it shows the tool changing as much as the coverage.
Read by status rather than category, the split sharpens. The edges on TechInsights’ Kirin 9000s, 9020 and 9030 findings are confirmed; the graph treats them as settled. The edges on how SMIC built them have sat “rumored” for up to three years without resolving one way or the other: the ASML DUV tools (since October 2023), the 5nm stockpile plan (February 2024), the Applied Materials and Lam Research sourcing claim (March 2024), a Mate 70 production struggle (September 2024), four edges from the domestic DUV lithography story (September 2025), and both Chinese-government AI-chip-allocation edges (November 2025). None has flipped to confirmed. None has been denied. The graph holds them exactly as reported and unresolved — closer to the interesting finding than a settled “capped by export controls” thesis, which the record does not actually establish either way for anything past the shipped chip itself.
The graph carries no direct SMIC-to-ASML edge at all, despite ASML’s DUV tools sitting inside the October 2023 chip story — the dependency shows up nested inside an SMIC-Huawei edge, never as its own link. SMIC and TSMC fare little better: six edges name both, all market rankings, share moves or industry-wide downturns — nothing about the foundry relationship itself.
The money
Currency: USD.
The record
Signals in the coverage record worth tracking, not trade ideas:
- SMIC’s third-quarter results, expected in November. SMIC guided revenue up 2% to 4% from the second quarter. Whether it lands there tests the run that took 2025 revenue to US$9.33B.
- Whether any of the long-pending rumored edges ever resolves. The 5nm-stockpile claim has sat unconfirmed since February 2024; the domestic DUV lithography story since September 2025. A confirmed or denied status on either would be the first hard data past the shipped-chip level.
- The next TechInsights teardown. Four TechInsights teardowns of Huawei devices in 27 months have been the record’s only independent node confirmations. A fifth — or its absence — is the cleanest test of whether the cadence holds.
- Hua Hong’s 7nm claim, still rumored as of March 2026. If it confirms, SMIC stops being the graph’s only edge for domestic 7nm production.
- Whether a direct SMIC-ASML edge ever appears, given how directly ASML’s tools sit inside SMIC’s own 7nm story without the graph ever linking the two companies outright.
| Quarter | Articles | QoQ | Q-end price | QoQ | The record reads |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025Q1 | 3 | — | 46.10 HKD | — | first quarter on record |
| 2025Q2 | 3 | +0% | 44.70 HKD | -3.0% | both steady |
| 2025Q3 | 5 | +67% | 79.55 HKD | +78.0% | attention and price rose together |
| 2025Q4 | 5 | +0% | 71.35 HKD | -10.3% | price fell, attention steady |
| 2026Q1 | 5 | +0% | 50.70 HKD | -28.9% | price fell, attention steady |
| 2026Q2 | 3 | -40% | 89.40 HKD | +76.3% | attention cooled as price rose |
| 2026Q3 | 3 | +0% | 60.65 HKD | -32.2% | price fell, attention steady |
| 2026Q4 open | 2 | -33% | 48.52 HKD | -20.0% | attention and price fell together (quarter in progress) |
The peers
SMIC lives or dies by the same constraint as these names — small equal-weighted groups, one constraint each. Not investment products: see all categories.
The other stack — the compute constraint, 2.3 independent bets across 7 names
Sources
Articles - “US sets export restrictions on China’s biggest chipmaker SMIC, saying exports to SMIC posed an ‘unacceptable risk’ of being diverted to ‘military end use’” — Financial Times, Sep 28, 2020. https://t.co/O0GImemCbk · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/1160996 - “US to add ~80 more Chinese companies and affiliates, including SMIC, to the trade blacklist” — Reuters, Dec 18, 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-sanctions-exclusive-idUSKBN28S0HL · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/961182 - “In a hedge against US sanctions, SMIC says it will list 1.69B new shares on a Shanghai exchange, seeking to raise $3B” — Bloomberg, May 6, 2020. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-06/smic-plans-shanghai-listing-that-could-yield-3-2-billion · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/953375 - “A chip teardown shows that China’s SMIC is quietly shipping 7nm chips; SMIC is rapidly becoming the world’s third largest foundry, behind TSMC and Samsung” — SemiAnalysis, Jul 21, 2022. https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/chinas-smic-is-shipping-7nm-foundry · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/981015 - “China’s SMIC producing 7nm chips is a breakthrough but experts suggest yields are low due to lacking EUV” — Financial Times, Aug 16, 2022. https://t.co/AvopGR0Fo9 · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/981849 - “TechInsights teardown: Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro uses a new Kirin 9000s chip that was fabricated in China by SMIC using a 7nm process, a blow to US sanctions” — Bloomberg, Sep 4, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-09-04/look-inside-huawei-mate-60-pro-phone-powered-by-made-in-china-chip · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/843789 - “SMIC used DUV lithography, not EUV, for its 7nm chip, which isn’t a breakthrough but does show progress” — Financial Times, Sep 22, 2023. https://t.co/hw5dD6a0bK · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/844463 - “Sources: SMIC used ASML’s DUV machines to produce its 7nm chip used by Huawei; ASML has never sold its EUV tools to China, but older DUV models can be retooled” — Bloomberg, Oct 25, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-25/controversial-chip-in-huawei-phone-was-produced-on-asml-machine · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/845541 - “Sources: SMIC plans to use its stock of US and Dutch-made equipment to build 5nm Kirin chips designed by Huawei’s HiSilicon” — Financial Times, Feb 6, 2024. https://t.co/fdDOVTBor9 · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/849068 - “Sources say SMIC used equipment from California-based Applied Materials and Lam Research to manufacture an advanced 7nm chip in China for Huawei in 2023” — Bloomberg, Mar 8, 2024. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-08/huawei-chip-breakthrough-used-tech-from-two-us-gear-suppliers · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/850150 - “TechInsights: Huawei’s new Mate 70 Pro Plus has a Kirin 9020 chip made by SMIC using the same 7nm process as in 2023’s Mate 60 Pro, despite rumors of a 5nm chip” — Bloomberg, Dec 11, 2024. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-11/huawei-s-new-mate-70-phone-shows-its-chip-advances-are-stalling · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/880228 - “SMIC’s Shanghai-listed shares rose 120% from a September 2024 low, outperforming Nvidia and TSMC over the same period” — Bloomberg, Nov 20, 2024. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-20/china-tech-stock-s-nvidia-beating-rally-faces-chip-war-threats · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/879495 - “Taiwan imposes export controls on Huawei, SMIC, and some of their subsidiaries, restricting their access to tech and equipment necessary for AI chip production” — Bloomberg, Jun 14, 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-14/taiwan-imposes-technology-export-controls-on-huawei-smic · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/886883 - “TechInsights: Huawei’s MateBook Fold uses SMIC’s 7nm chip, like the Mate 60 Pro that stunned the US two years ago, suggesting export rules are hampering Huawei” — Bloomberg, Jun 23, 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-23/huawei-s-new-laptop-adds-to-evidence-of-stalled-chip-advance · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/887156 - “Sources: SMIC is testing China’s first domestically produced deep-ultraviolet lithography machine, aiming to reduce reliance on western chipmaking technology” — Financial Times, Sep 17, 2025. https://t.co/gMw37ozvBt · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/890304 - “TechInsights: Huawei’s Kirin 9030 chip, used in its Mate 80 Pro Max phone, is China’s most advanced chip to date and was produced with SMIC’s updated 7nm tech” — Bloomberg, Dec 11, 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/china-s-huawei-and-smic-make-progress-with-chips-report-finds · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/893605 - “SMIC plans to acquire the remaining 49% stake in its SMNC unit for about 40.6 billion yuan” — Reuters, Dec 29, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-smic-take-full-control-unit-smnc-58-billion-deal-2025-12-29/ · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/1154227 - “SMIC reports Q4 revenue up 13% YoY to $2.49B, above est., net profit up 61% YoY to $172.85M, and annual revenue up 16% YoY to $9.33B in 2025” — Wall Street Journal, Feb 10, 2026. https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/smic-earnings-top-expectations-on-strong-chip-demand-d9331f4a · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/1163140 - “Applied Materials reaches a $252M settlement with the US Commerce Department, resolving allegations it illegally exported chipmaking equipment to SMIC in China” — Reuters, Feb 12, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/applied-materials-pay-252-million-resolve-illegal-chip-exports-us-says-2026-02-12/ · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/1163313 - “Sources: Hua Hong is readying a 7nm process at its Shanghai fab with Huawei’s help, which would make it China’s second chipmaker with such tech, after SMIC” — Reuters, Mar 16, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-no-2-chipmaker-readies-7-nm-production-beijing-ramps-up-self-suffiency-2026-03-16/ · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/1165295 - “Senior Trump officials say SMIC has been sending chipmaking tools to Iran for about a year; the US has sanctioned the company over alleged Chinese military ties” — Reuters, Mar 27, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-top-chipmaker-has-supplied-chipmaking-tech-iran-military-us-officials-say-2026-03-27/ · TEXXR record: https://texxr.com/1166013 - SMIC, unaudited results for the three months ended June 30, 2026 — HKEX announcement, Aug 13, 2026. https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2026/0813/2026081300353.pdf
Edges (TEXXR knowledge graph) - #325331 — regulatory/confirmed: US export restrictions on SMIC, “unacceptable risk” of military end use. - #323997 — regulatory/rumored: US plans to add SMIC to the Entity List. - #312535 — financial/confirmed: SMIC’s Shanghai listing, a hedge against sanctions. - #272394 — launch/confirmed: teardown shows SMIC shipping 7nm chips. - #272395 — financial/confirmed: SMIC becomes world’s third-largest foundry. - #273770 — launch/confirmed: SMIC’s 7nm production described as a breakthrough. - #273771 — controversy/confirmed: Douglas Fuller says SMIC’s 7nm yields are “terrible.” - #252087 — launch/confirmed: TechInsights finds Kirin 9000s in Mate 60 Pro. - #252088 — partnership/confirmed: SMIC fabricated the Kirin 9000s for Huawei. - #252089 — regulatory/confirmed: the finding is a blow to US sanctions. - #253159 — launch/confirmed: SMIC’s 7nm chip used DUV, not EUV. - #253160 — controversy/confirmed: the chip is progress, not a breakthrough. - #255291 — controversy/rumored: SMIC used ASML DUV machines for the 7nm chip. - #15284 — regulatory/rumored: SMIC’s 5nm-chip stockpile-equipment plan. - #17876 — regulatory/rumored: SMIC used Applied Materials/Lam Research gear for 7nm. - #57897 — launch/confirmed: Kirin 9020 uses the same 7nm process as 2023. - #57898 — launch/rumored: rumor of a 5nm Kirin chip, not confirmed. - #56163 — financial/confirmed: SMIC shares rose 120% from a September 2024 low. - #73569 — regulatory/confirmed: Taiwan export controls on Huawei and SMIC. - #81459 — launch/rumored: SMIC testing a domestic DUV lithography machine. - #81460 — regulatory/rumored: SMIC aims to reduce reliance on Western tech. - #89020 — launch/confirmed: SMIC produced the Kirin 9030 on updated 7nm tech. - #89021 — partnership/confirmed: Huawei and SMIC as manufacturing partners on Kirin 9030. - #236604 — acquisition/confirmed: SMIC to buy the remaining 49% of SMNC. - #96779 — financial/confirmed: SMIC 2025 revenue of $9.33B, above 2024’s $8.03B. - #97169 — legal/confirmed: Applied Materials’ $252M settlement over exports to SMIC. - #104953 — competitor/rumored: Hua Hong’s reported 7nm process rivaling SMIC. - #235220 — controversy/rumored: allegation SMIC sent chipmaking tools to Iran. - #235221 — regulatory/confirmed: US sanctions SMIC over alleged military ties.