Bitmain is anxious? Canaan Creative is rumored to mass produce 7nm mining chips in July

1. It is said that Bitmain has cut orders, and its founder Zhan Ketuan visited Taiwan last week;

2. Canaan Creative's 7nm mining chips are said to be in mass production in July, earlier than Bitmain;

3. Bitcoin price falls back to $7,500, but AMD and Nvidia share prices hit new highs

1. It is said that Bitmain has cut orders, and its founder Zhan Ketuan visited Taiwan last week;

According to reports, Bitmain co-founder and co-CEO Zhan Ketuan made a whirlwind visit to Taiwan last week, visiting supply chain partners such as TSMC and Powerchip to seek cooperation on a new generation of high-performance mining chips and discuss the direction of cooperation after Bitmain's transformation to develop AI applications.

Industry sources pointed out that when Zhan Ketuan visited Taiwan this time, he was personally received by Powerchip founder and CEO Huang Chongren, and TSMC co-CEO Wei Zhejia, who will be promoted to president, highlighting the importance the two companies attach to Bitmain.

The price of virtual currencies has been volatile recently, with Bitcoin once facing a battle to defend the $7,000 mark. The market has doubts about the virtual currency market, and there are reports that Bitmain has significantly slowed down its supply chain supply chain, and calls for order cancellations are heard everywhere.

Last week, Jihan Wu visited Taiwan to discuss new cooperation projects with TSMC and Powerchip, which means that Bitmain will continue to strengthen cooperation with partners such as TSMC, dispelling rumors of order cuts. This not only affects the future trends of virtual currencies, but also affects the orders of mining machine-related manufacturers such as Creative and Faraday.

Industry sources pointed out that considering the rapid decline in virtual currency prices from their highs, mining machine manufacturers are actively looking for more efficient mining solutions. In order to improve the shortcomings of the previous generation of mining machines and increase the incentives for "miners" to mine at a lower cost, thereby solving the problem of virtual currency price collapse, miners' lack of profitability, and the entire mining market's popularity collapsing, Zhan Ketuan came to Taiwan this time, hoping to develop a newer generation of high-performance mining chips through the technology of TSMC and Powerchip.

Since the biggest cost for miners is the high power consumption during mining, the new generation of mining machines most needs lower energy consumption and higher computing power. TSMC's advanced process technology and Powerchip's unique foundry capabilities in the memory field are highly favored by Bitmain.

Bitmain is also transforming towards the development of AI, which has a huge demand for ASIC and memory. Bitmain has previously reached a strategic cooperation consensus with Powerchip in the memory field, with Powerchip's subsidiary AIPU providing the memory required for Bitmain's future AI applications, and Powerchip being responsible for foundry.

2. Canaan Creative's 7nm mining chips are said to be in mass production in July, earlier than Bitmain;

It is reported that Canaan Creative's 7nm application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) produced by TSMC will be put into mass production in July, which is faster than Bitmain's progress.

Canaan Creative held a supplier conference in mainland China last month, revealing its supply chain list for the first time. Its main suppliers in Taiwan include TSMC, Creative, Lelon, and Polytron.

At Canaan Creative's supplier conference, the biggest award was given to TSMC, mainly due to the cooperation between the two parties on ASIC chips. TSMC's excellent power-saving process has become the main contributor to Canaan Creative's layout in the mining machine market.

According to the supply chain, Jianan Creative's new generation of ASIC is also being produced at TSMC, jumping from the previous generation's 16nm to 7nm, and plans to start mass production in July. In terms of the use of advanced processes, the progress is faster than that of its top competitor Bitmain. However, this information has not been confirmed by TSMC.

Last year, Canaan Creative's revenue exceeded RMB 1.2 billion and its profit exceeded RMB 300 million, with year-on-year growth rates of 20 times and 125 times respectively. This year's revenue and profit are expected to reach RMB 10 billion and RMB 5 billion respectively, and there are rumors that it may apply for an IPO in Hong Kong.

3. Bitcoin price falls back to $7,500, but AMD and Nvidia share prices hit new highs

After Bitcoin fluctuated and fell, the stock prices of chip companies that once relied on "mining machines" for huge profits continued to rise sharply.

AMD (14.4, 0.67, 4.88%) shares rose 4.88% on Friday to close at $14.40, the highest closing price since July 26 last year.

Before chip maker AMD's shares hit a 10-month high, Cisco Systems announced on Thursday that it would use AMD chips in servers that previously only used Intel chips.

Nvidia's stock price rose 2.15% to $257.80 on Friday, still maintaining near its historical high. Wall Street News Network previously mentioned that Nvidia's profits have exceeded market expectations for ten consecutive quarters, and its profits and revenues in the fourth quarter of last year both set new records.

AMD's stock price has risen 40% this year, significantly outperforming the 13% increase in the semiconductor index SOX. In the past 12 months, AMD and SOX have had similar returns, with AMD up 32% and SOX up 29%.

Stifel analyst Kevin Cassidy raised AMD's target price from $14 to $17. In fact, AMD's stock price exceeded the $14 mark at the end of October last year.

On Thursday, Cisco announced that its new multi-node server, the UCS C125 M5 rack server node, uses AMD's EPYC chip architecture. Cassidy believes this news is positive for AMD's stock price.

At the 46th Cowen Technology Conference, AMD Technical Director Mark Papermaster once again announced the development of 7nm process technology. He said that 7nm technology will greatly improve transistor density and power consumption. He also revealed that there are currently three 7nm products under development, and all subsequent products will use 7nm, which will be officially sampled in the second half of the year.

Bitcoin continues to decline, but are there any hidden concerns for graphics chip companies as they soar?

Bitcoin's volatile downward trend since December last year has continued, falling below the $7,500 mark again and testing the $7,000 mark at the beginning of this week.

Bloomberg quoted Paul Day, a technical analyst and head of futures and options at Market Securities Dubai Ltd., as saying that Bitcoin is replicating the market trend four years ago. "Market sentiment is no different from that time, and the downward trend will continue for a long time."

Paul Day believes that considering that Bitcoin fell below its previous 252-day average last Friday, it means that the next low is brewing and it is possible to fall to $2,800 by the end of the year.

Wall Street Journal previously mentioned that the market is concerned about whether chip stocks such as Nvidia can continue to maintain strong performance growth in the future without digital currency-related businesses.

For example, the performance of Nvidia's data center business in its May financial report, which provides support for the cloud businesses of Amazon (1641.54, 11.92, 0.73%), Microsoft (100.79, 1.95, 1.97%), Google (1119.5, 34.51, 3.18%) and other companies, was slightly lower than market expectations. The financial report disclosed that Nvidia's data center business revenue increased by 71% year-on-year to US$701 million, which was lower than the market's previous expectation of US$703 million.

Analyst Kevin Cassidy believes that Nvidia's first-quarter revenue was higher than market expectations mainly due to digital currency-related revenue. For a stock with an estimated price-to-earnings ratio of "40 times", this performance is not good enough.

Nvidia believes in its financial report that its performance mainly comes from artificial intelligence, the gaming market, and digital currency. More and more data center operators are using Nvidia chips to perform tasks comparable to artificial intelligence computing. The gaming business, which contributes nearly 60% of total revenue, is also supported by demand for digital currencies, because digital currency mining also requires high-end graphics cards.