(Yicai Global) March 27 -- Cambricon Technologies rebutted a report that said the Chinese developer and supplier of integrated circuits has cooperated with Baidu on the tech giant's Ernie Bot, a ChatGPT-style artificial intelligent chatbot.

The report that Ernie Bot uses Cambricon's products is false, the Beijing-based company said yesterday.

JW Insights, a service platform for the Chinese information and communications technology industry, reported on March 16 that Baidu's cloud computing center in Yangquan, Shanxi province, which mainly handles Ernie Bot’s training in reasoning, mostly uses Nvidia's A100 and Cambricon's Siyuan 590 chips, among other domestic products.

Cambricon does not directly develop and sell AI end products and applications such as Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, the company said. The firm researches, develops, and innovates AI chip technology, it noted.

Shares of Cambricon [SHA: 688256] ended 1.9 percent higher today at CNY186.39 (USD27.10) each, after earlier dropping by as much as 6 percent. The stock has surged 82 percent since March 16.

Cambricon makes core AI processor chips, and it can provide a fundamental computing platform related to various AI tech, including vision, speech, natural language processing, and conventional machine learning, the company said. These products are in the adaptive phase and do not generate revenue, it noted. 

Whether clients will place big orders depends on the products’ technical capacities, delivery ability, prices, and consumers' willingness to purchase, it added, noting that there are uncertainties. 

Founded in 2016, Cambricon's net loss likely widened 41 percent to CNY1.2 billion (USD174.4 million) in the 12 months ended Dec. 31 from the year before. The firm has never turned a profit.

Editor: Martin Kadiev