Economic Observer reporter Zheng Chenye

In the domestic AI computing power industry chain, the degree of binding between Haiguang Information (688041. SH) and Zhongke Shuguang (603019. SH) may exceed most people's imagination.

As of the end of 2025, Zhongke Shuguang is the largest shareholder of Haiguang Information, holding 27.96% of the shares; Zhongke Shuguang is also the largest related party of Haiguang Information - Haiguang Information's annual report shows that its largest customer is a related party, with sales of 8.149 billion yuan in 2025, accounting for 56.68% of Haiguang Information's operating revenue.

On April 14th, Zhongke Shuguang released its 2025 annual report: the annual revenue was 14.964 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 13.81%. On April 7th, Haiguang Information also released its 2025 annual report: the annual revenue was 14.377 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 56.92%. That is to say, the two have similar revenue scales, but their revenue growth rates differ by four times.

On the secondary market, as of the close on April 14th, the total market value of Haiguang Information was 578.2 billion yuan, and the total market value of Zhongke Shuguang was 130 billion yuan. Roughly estimated based on the 27.96% stake held by Zhongke Shuguang in Haiguang Information, this equity corresponds to a market value of approximately 161.7 billion yuan, which is more than 30 billion yuan more than Zhongke Shuguang's own market value.

The cost pressure of Haiguang Information

By the end of 2025, Haiguang Information had a total of 3333 employees, of which over 80% were research and development engineers.

In 2025, this company's revenue will be 14.377 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 56.92%; Realize a net profit attributable to the parent company of RMB 2.545 billion, a year-on-year increase of 31.79%; Deducting non recurring net profit of 2.305 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 26.92%. In the first quarter of 2026, the company's performance growth rate further accelerated, with a single quarter revenue of 4.034 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 68.06%; The net profit attributable to the parent company was 687 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 35.82%.

Haiguang Information's main business is the research and development, design, and sales of high-end processors used in servers and workstations. The products are divided into two major series. Among them, the Haiguang CPU is compatible with the x86 instruction set, which is the most mainstream chip architecture in the global server market. This also means that operating systems and application software developed based on x86 can run directly on the Haiguang CPU without the need for users to redevelop or significantly modify the code; Haiguang DCU (Deep Computing Processor) is designed based on GPGPU architecture, mainly targeting scenarios that require large-scale parallel computing such as AI model training and inference, scientific computing, etc. Its software ecosystem is compatible with mainstream AI development frameworks and has low migration costs.

From the annual report, it can be seen that the growth driving force of Haiguang Information comes from two directions.

The first driving force is the demand for AI computing power. According to IDC data, the accelerated server market in China will grow by 134% year-on-year in 2024, with a market size of 22.1 billion US dollars; It is expected that by 2029, this number will exceed 140 billion US dollars. According to the data of the Chinese Academy of Information Technology and Insight Consulting, from 2024 to 2029, the composite growth rate of computing power scale in Chinese Mainland is expected to be 49.7%.

The second driving force is the demand for localization. Currently, domestic substitution is penetrating from traditional fields such as government and finance to more industries, with education being a typical direction. Shao Weihui, Assistant Director of the Information Office of Tongji University, recently mentioned in an interview with the Economic Observer that by the end of 2025, Tongji University was required to submit a localization renovation plan for the registration of the intelligent transportation model with the Cyberspace Administration of China. However, this requirement did not exist when the civil engineering model was registered two years ago.

This change is directly beneficial for Haiguang Information, as Haiguang Information is a domestic CPU manufacturer compatible with the x86 instruction set, and users who migrate from Intel or AMD hardly need to change their code. Yu Zhe, General Manager of Haiguang Information Education Industry, told Economic Observer that Haiguang Information's OEM, packaging, and high bandwidth memory particles all come from the domestic supply chain.

According to the annual report information, as of the end of 2025, Haiguang, relying on its initiated "photosynthetic organization", has gathered over 6000 partners and completed more than 15000 software and hardware adaptation tests; Haiguang DCU has also been adapted to 365 mainstream models such as DeepSeek, Qwen3, Hybrid, and Zhipu.

But on the other hand of performance growth, cost pressure is also increasing.

Haiguang Information is a chip design company and does not own a wafer factory. That is to say, after the chip design is completed, both wafer processing and packaging testing need to be entrusted to external manufacturers for completion. In this mode, the production capacity and quotation of upstream contract factories and packaging and testing factories directly affect the cost of Haiguang Information.

In 2025, this impact is evident: that year, the gross profit margin of Haiguang Information's main business was 57.78%, a year-on-year decrease of 5.92 percentage points. According to the company's disclosure, the price increase of upstream raw materials and storage auxiliary materials has led to a significant increase in unit procurement costs, with a direct material cost of 2.612 billion yuan for the whole year, a year-on-year increase of 125.95%. Due to the tight production capacity of contract manufacturers, processing costs have increased in the packaging and testing process, resulting in a packaging and testing cost of 1.233 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 45.20%.

In 2025, the operating cost of Haiguang Information will reach 6.063 billion yuan, with a growth rate of 82.40%, higher than the revenue growth rate; The sales expenses amounted to 633 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 260.69%, mainly used to expand the marketing team and promote ecological construction; R&D investment was 4.569 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 32.58%, accounting for 31.78% of revenue.

In terms of customer concentration, the top five customers of Haiguang Information in 2025 accounted for 90.28% of its annual revenue, with the largest customer being related parties, with annual sales of 8.149 billion yuan, accounting for 56.68% of its revenue. Haiguang stated in its annual report that the client had a significant increase in the quantity of products purchased from the company due to special project procurement needs.

From the perspective of equity relationship, Zhongke Shuguang holds 27.96% of the shares of Haiguang, making it the largest related party of Haiguang Information. This also means that by 2025, more than half of Haiguang Information's chips may reach end-users through Zhongke Shuguang's servers and data centers.

Zhongke Shuguang's' Cold Core Repair '

According to the annual report, Zhongke Shuguang's annual revenue for 2025 was 14.964 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 13.81%; Net profit attributable to the parent company was 2.176 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 13.87%; Deducting non recurring net profit of 1.838 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 33.97%.

The 2026 Q1 performance report shows that the company's non recurring net profit increased by 57.77% year-on-year, and the accelerating trend of profit growth continues.

Zhongke Shuguang's main business covers the research and sales of IT equipment such as high-performance computers, general-purpose servers, storage, and network security, as well as software development, system integration, and technical services provided around these devices. On this basis, Zhongke Shuguang has also laid out business directions such as cloud computing, data center infrastructure (including liquid cooling and heat dissipation), intelligent computing centers, and computing power services.

That is to say, in the computing power industry chain, Haiguang Information does chip design, while Zhongke Shuguang does most of the things outside of chips, from complete machine manufacturing, storage systems, security products, to cloud services, liquid cooling and heat dissipation, and computing power operations.

The revenue structure of Zhongke Shuguang has undergone significant changes: the annual revenue of IT equipment was 12.503 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6.81%, and the gross profit margin was 27.31%, basically unchanged; The software development, system integration, and technical services sectors are truly driving profits, with a total annual revenue of 2.446 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 75.34%, and a gross profit margin of 47.25%, a year-on-year increase of 3.53 percentage points. In the annual report, Zhongke Shuguang also attributed the growth to the significant increase in revenue from data centers, cloud computing, and custom development services.

On the cost side, in 2025, the R&D expenses of Zhongke Shuguang amounted to 1.671 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 29.33%; 3199 R&D personnel, accounting for 53.10% of the company's total employees; Sales expenses amounted to 703 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 9.08%.

In terms of customer concentration, the top five customers accounted for 82.56% of the annual revenue, with two of them being new customers added in 2025. The annual purchase amount of the largest new customer reached 2.897 billion yuan, accounting for 19.36% of the total annual sales of Zhongke Shuguang.

In 2025, the net operating cash flow of Zhongke Shuguang was 1.313 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 51.75%. The company explained this for two reasons: firstly, the large amount of entrusted development project funds received last year were paid according to the progress in this period; The second is to purchase large deposit certificates to enhance the return on idle funds.

From the annual report, it can be seen that the business landscape of Zhongke Shuguang has become quite diverse. In addition to server sales, several business lines such as storage, liquid cooling, supernodes, cloud computing, and computing power services are being promoted with varying degrees of progress.

According to the annual report, the company's ParaStor distributed storage has won the bid for China Mobile's centralized procurement for six consecutive years; The super node and ten thousand card super cluster have been launched on the national super computing Internet core node, but "large-scale deployment and application have not been realized in the market"; The DAP deep computing intelligent engine platform based on domestic acceleration cards has been jointly evaluated by institutions such as the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, and is currently being applied in industries such as finance and healthcare.

Among these business lines, liquid cooling has been a rapidly growing direction for Zhongke Shuguang in recent years. Its subsidiary Shuguang Shuchuang began researching liquid cooling technology in 2011 and is one of the earliest domestic manufacturers to enter this field.

One important reason for the rapid increase in demand for liquid cooling is the rising power consumption of domestically produced AI chips. Zhang Peng, the person in charge of Shuguang Shuchuang, told the Economic Observer that due to the process gap (5-7 nanometers domestically and 2-3 nanometers abroad), domestic AI chips require larger chip area and higher power consumption to achieve the same computing power.

The higher the power consumption of the chip, the higher the requirements for heat dissipation. Traditional data centers rely on air conditioning and fans for heat dissipation. When the power consumption of a single chip exceeds a certain limit, the heat exchange efficiency of the air is insufficient. The principle of liquid cooling is to directly contact or soak the heating components with liquid, and the heat transfer efficiency is much higher than that of air.

There are currently two mainstream liquid cooling solutions: one is called cold plate liquid cooling, which allows liquid to flow through the surface of the chip in a closed pipeline to remove heat; Another method is immersion liquid cooling, which involves immersing the entire chip in a non-conductive coolant. This method provides more thorough heat dissipation, but also makes deployment more complex.

In response to the reality of high power consumption of domestic chips, Zhang Peng proposed a "cold chip compensation" approach, which improves the actual operational performance of chips through heat dissipation technology and partially compensates for the process gap. According to its introduction, a GPU data center in Beijing has undergone a wind cooling to liquid cooling project. After the renovation, the overall electricity consumption has been reduced by 45%. The removal of internal fans in the server has saved about 20% of power consumption, and the cancellation of external air conditioning has saved more than ten percentage points of power consumption.

However, liquid cooling technology itself also faces bottlenecks. Huang Yuanfeng, the technical director of Shuguang Shuchuang, told the Economic Observer that currently all heat dissipation methods are focused on the outside of the chip package, but the internal temperature of the chip may exceed 100 degrees, while the external surface of the package is only 80 degrees. No matter how good the external heat dissipation is, it cannot solve this 20 degree temperature difference.

The chip is wearing a fur vest, and if you set the air conditioning to 18 degrees, it's still hot. You need to take off the fur vest first, "Zhang Peng said.

Unfinished Merge

On May 26, 2025, Haiguang Information and Zhongke Shuguang simultaneously announced plans for a major asset restructuring. The basic plan is for Haiguang Information to issue shares to all A-share shareholders of Zhongke Shuguang through stock exchange, absorb and merge Zhongke Shuguang, and raise matching funds.

If completed, the two listed companies will merge into one entity.

On June 6, 2025, the board of directors of both parties approved the relevant contingency plan and resumed trading on June 10. In the following six months, both parties disclosed multiple progress announcements on the restructuring. On December 9, 2025, both parties held their respective board meetings and announced the termination of this restructuring.

The two companies provided the same explanation for the termination of the restructuring in their announcement: "Due to the large scale of this transaction and the involvement of many related parties, the demonstration of the major asset restructuring plan took a long time. Currently, the market environment has undergone significant changes compared to the initial planning of this transaction, and the conditions for implementing the major asset restructuring are not yet mature

After the termination of the restructuring, Zhongke Shuguang still holds 27.96% of the shares of Haiguang Information, making it its largest shareholder. Haiguang Information's profit growth is still directly reflected in Zhongke Shuguang's financial statements through investment income.

On the evening of April 14, 2026, a notice was also disclosed along with the annual report of Zhongke Shuguang: the shareholding ratio of Zhongke Suanyuan, the original controlling shareholder of Zhongke Shuguang, has dropped to 14.68%; Due to the dispersed shareholding ratio of major shareholders, there is no situation where a single shareholder can control the voting of the shareholders' meeting or decide on the appointment of more than half of the directors. Therefore, the control status of Zhongke Shuguang has changed to no controlling shareholder or actual controller.

From the relevant announcement content, although the restructuring has been terminated and the control structure of Zhongke Shuguang has also changed, it seems that the business binding between Zhongke Shuguang and Haiguang Information has not loosened. In addition, according to the 2025 annual report, the growth centers of the two companies are showing different directions.

As of April 14th, the equity of Haiguang Information held by Zhongke Shuguang is roughly estimated to be around 160 billion yuan based on market value, while Zhongke Shuguang's own market value is 130 billion yuan.

The investment income of Zhongke Shuguang in 2025 is 683 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 21.22%. Haiguang Information is the main joint venture of Zhongke Shuguang, and its profits constitute the core source of investment income for Zhongke Shuguang. Haiguang Information's net profit in 2025 is 2.545 billion yuan, and Zhongke Shuguang holds a 27.96% stake in it. The corresponding investment income accounts for more than 30% of Zhongke Shuguang's annual net profit attributable to the parent company of 2.176 billion yuan.

More than 30% of Zhongke Shuguang's net profit attributable to shareholders comes from investment returns on Haiguang Information, and nearly 60% of Haiguang Information's revenue comes from Zhongke Shuguang. This also means that the two companies are each other's most important partners, and the deeper the binding, the faster the business fluctuations of either party will be transmitted to the other.