Moore Threads now shows Chinese AI buyers paying for domestic GPUs at scale, but a RMB3.31 billion nine-month cash outflow means growth still depends on its listing proceeds.
Moore Threads, the Beijing graphics processor maker that listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market last December, reported third-quarter revenue of RMB1.552 billion on October 28, up 1,773.92% from a year earlier and 55.4% from the second quarter. Net profit attributable to shareholders was RMB49.26 million, and profit excluding non-recurring items turned positive at RMB20.07 million, the first time the company has posted a quarterly profit on that measure, The Paper reported.
The result matters because it is the clearest financial evidence yet that Chinese AI developers are buying domestic general-purpose GPUs in volume. In its report, the company said revenue kept rising as compute demand grew and products were delivered at scale, and that profitability had arrived earlier than planned. It credited customer demand for its intelligent-computing products, led by the MTT S5000, according to Xinhua Finance.
The profit is thin, and the balance sheet tells a more demanding story. Inventory, prepayments and cash outflows have all grown faster than earnings, which means the next few quarters will show whether the company is building stock for real orders or ahead of them.
Nine-month revenue more than quadrupled while core profit stayed negative
For the first nine months of 2026, revenue rose 319.15% to RMB3.289 billion. Net profit attributable to shareholders came to RMB37.70 million, while the result excluding one-off items was still a loss of RMB131 million, sharply narrower than a year earlier. Gross profit for the period reached RMB1.77 billion, up 263.9%, which implies a gross margin of about 54%; the company did not state a margin figure in the reports cited here.
The quarterly path explains why the third quarter stands out. In the first quarter, Moore Threads reported net profit of RMB29.36 million, mostly because of about RMB72 million in other income, largely government grants, while its core business still lost RMB54.28 million, TrendForce reported. The second quarter brought a net loss of RMB40.92 million. In full-year 2025 the company had revenue of RMB1.505 billion and a net loss of RMB1.001 billion. Trailing 12-month revenue has now reached RMB4.01 billion, according to The Paper.
Research spending keeps rising but at a slower rate than sales. Third-quarter research and development expense was RMB571 million, up 87.89%, and the nine-month total of RMB1.34 billion already exceeds the whole of 2025.
Inventory and cash burn show how the growth is being financed
Moore Threads held RMB3.363 billion of inventory at the end of September, more than its entire revenue for the first nine months of the year. Inventory was up 152% from the end of 2025, prepayments to suppliers rose 45% to RMB2.599 billion, and receivables climbed 129% to RMB994 million, Yicai reported in an article republished by Sina Finance. The September figure was slightly below the RMB3.55 billion held at the end of June, which Yicai reported in August, so inventory edged down in the third quarter after rising in each of the first two.
Operating cash flow over the nine months was negative RMB3.309 billion, and cash and deposits fell 41% to RMB5.39 billion. The company attributed the outflow to expanding production and strategically stockpiling inventory. In a market where memory and advanced packaging are scarce, buying ahead can protect deliveries, but it ties up the capital raised in last year’s listing, when Moore Threads sold shares at RMB114.28 and raised about RMB8 billion.
The largest visible demand signal is JD Cloud. In September, JD Cloud said it would build a cluster of 100,000 Moore Threads GPUs for its JoyAI models, a plan EastFrontier covered when JD Cloud and Moore Threads announced it. The quarterly report says the two companies are deepening that cooperation for large-model training, inference and embodied intelligence, according to the 21st Century Business Herald, which carried a Securities Times report. No timetable or revenue contribution for the cluster has been disclosed.
The fourth quarter will show whether stockpiled chips become revenue
The comparison with peers frames the opportunity. Cambricon reported nine-month revenue of RMB9.526 billion and net profit of RMB3.715 billion, and MetaX has guided to a return to profit for the same period, according to Yicai and Securities Times. Moore Threads remains smaller and earlier in its profit cycle, and its shares closed at RMB381.50 on October 28, up 5.84%, for a market value of about RMB179.3 billion before the results were released that evening.
The company has also described a strategy built around three "AI factories" for model training, token production and AI-agent production, which points toward selling computing services as well as chips. The figures to watch in the full-year report are fourth-quarter revenue against the RMB3.36 billion inventory pile, and whether core profit holds above zero for a second quarter without help from grants.