(Yicai Global) July 7 -- Cambricon Technologies, a Chinese designer and maker of artificial intelligence chips, plans to raise CNY2.6 billion (USD368 million) from its initial public offering on Shanghai's Star Market.

Subscriptions to the offering, which is about CNY200 million (USD28.5 million) less than earlier planned, will be accepted from tomorrow, the Beijing-based company said in a stock exchange filing yesterday, without disclosing when the shares will begin trading.

After the US government set various obstacles to stop Chinese companies from buying semiconductors, China’s drive to become more self-reliant when it comes to chip design and production has buoyed the country’s semiconductor industry.

China's biggest contract chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., has more than doubled the amount of money it seeks to raise in a secondary listing on the Nasdaq-style Star Market to between CNY46.3 billion and CNY53.2 billion (USD6.58 billion and USD7.57 billion) from an initial CNY20 billion. That would make it the Chinese mainland’s biggest share sale in a decade.

Cambricon plans to sell 40.1 million shares, or 10 percent of its total equity, at CNY64.4 (USD9.20) each. Proceeds of the sale will go to support the firm's core business -- involving cloud training, inference, and edge-end artificial intelligence – and supplement working capital.

Brothers Chen Tianshi and Chen Yunji co-founded Cambricon in 2016 to make semiconductors that help smart servers and other devices better understand human behavior.

Cambricon expects a net loss of between CNY400 million and CNY650 million this year, it said in the filing. Revenue could double to between CNY600 million and CNY900 million from a year ago. The business may remain unprofitable for some time after its listing due to big investments in research and development over the next several years, it added.

Last year, Cambricon lost CNY1.2 billion on revenue of CNY444 million. Its R&D spending was more than double its operating income.

Chen Tianshi is Cambricon's actual controller and largest shareholder with 33.2 percent of equity pre IPO, according to its March prospectus. The second-biggest shareholder is Beijing Zhongke Suanyuan Technology Development, which is owned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Computing Technology. It has an 18.2 percent stake.

Editor: Emmi Laine