Ankaiwei Precise Positioning AI Chip Entry: Chairman Hu Shengfa Provides the First Detailed Explanation of the Comprehensive AI Transformation Strategy

In 2025, the semiconductor industry is at a crossroads in the cycle: traditional consumer electronics faces a two-pronged battle between inventory and pricing, while the AI wave is reshaping computing architectures and terminal form factors. In this interweaving of “ice and fire,” a Science and Technology Innovation Board company that the market has long simply categorized as an “IoT SoC chip supplier”—Guangzhou A-King Microelectronics Co., Ltd. (hereinafter “A-King Micro,” stock code 688620)—is quietly completing a strategic transformation that reaches deep into its core.

Recently, after the company’s listing, Dr. Hu Shengfa, Chairman of A-King Micro, for the first time provided a comprehensive public explanation of the company’s AI transformation strategy and future growth logic. Having a background in AI from Tsinghua University and with more than 30 years of deep focus in the chip industry, this “seasoned technical veteran” systematically explained how A-King Micro has shifted from its prior positioning centered on IoT camera-chip technology to its new role as an AI and multimodal intelligent computing platform company.

From teaming up with Paradigm Intelligence to enter the AI glasses arena, to the “R&D acceleration” of launching 16 new chips in 2025, and then to acquiring Sichu Technology and investing in a visual large-model unicorn, A-King Micro is building an increasingly complete AI ecosystem closed loop based on “connectivity + computing power + algorithms.” Hu Shengfa said directly: “The company is standing at the starting point of a new round of performance growth cycle driven by the widespread adoption of AI.”

Anchoring the edge-side AI hotspot:

From a Paradigm Intelligence partner to a core AI-glasses chip supplier

A revaluation of a tech company’s value in the market often begins with the landing of a signature product. In the AI space, A-King Micro is not jumping out of thin air; its technology products have already quietly entered mainstream AI application scenarios. For A-King Micro, AI glasses are that fulcrum for unlocking incremental market demand.

“Our collaboration with Paradigm Intelligence is comprehensive.” Hu Shengfa pointed out the key. Paradigm Intelligence is a leading B-end AI large-model company listed in Hong Kong, and a technology company focused on decision AI; its intelligent services have broadly penetrated key industries such as healthcare, finance, logistics, and energy.

In the AI-glasses domain, A-King Micro covers diverse scenarios—from low-power connectivity to high-performance AI photography—through its chip matrix such as KM01W and KM02G. Its solutions have been applied in Paradigm Intelligence Group’s MicroK Technology AI smart glasses and Haosheng Technology’s AI cycling glasses, demonstrating the breadth of its technology deployment.

Hu Shengfa showed the author several AI-glasses prototypes equipped with A-King Micro chips, covering audio glasses, imaging glasses, and even AR glasses with display functions. Hu Shengfa disclosed that the company’s AI-glasses chips began shipping in the fourth quarter of 2025, and in the first quarter of 2026 it had already received orders for more than 100,000 units, marking a substantive breakthrough from 0 to 1 in the high–added-value AI terminal market. The cooperation with Paradigm Intelligence’s MicroK brand’s launch of 13-megapixel AI smart glasses is the best footnote to the successful landing of its products.

The “domestic substitution” logic behind AI glasses

A new terminal market is opening up imagination space for A-King Micro’s performance growth. Hu Shengfa explicitly defined smart glasses as the company’s “new growth driver.”

“Although Qualcomm’s AR1 chip is powerful, its high costs and previous supply tightness objectively create a window for domestic substitution.” Hu Shengfa analyzed that for the smart-glasses market, whose annual shipment volume is currently still in the millions to tens of millions, a giant like Qualcomm invests relatively limited resources. And it is precisely this that provides a golden window for domestic manufacturers like A-King Micro—focused on niche scenarios and able to respond quickly—to “change lanes and overtake.”

On January 24, A-King Micro disclosed in its 2025 performance forecast that over the past year, seven R&D projects completed tape-out, gradually entered the mass-production stage, began shipping in 2025, with shipment volume exceeding 17 million units. The products cover areas such as vision and audio. The shipped chips include SoC chips used in the AI-glasses field, among others. The company will accelerate the market introduction process for the products that have already taped out, promoting rapid ramp-up and volume expansion for new products.

AI computing-power chips have become the new product norm

If AI glasses are the front-stage results of A-King Micro’s transformation, then the deep computing-power orientation of its product structure is the qualitative change in its back-end capabilities. In its prospectus, A-King Micro was positioned as an IoT intelligent hardware core SoC chip design company. However, Hu Shengfa emphasized that this traditional understanding has lagged behind the company’s current technological reality, and the company is undergoing a “systemic change.”

“From the shipment structure, before 2022, our chips were almost all pure IoT function-type chips. But starting in 2022, chips with AI computing power began shipping in volume.” Hu Shengfa provided a set of key data: In 2023, the company’s shipment volume of AI-enabled chips with computing power exceeded ten million units; in 2024, this figure approached 20 million units; by 2025, it is expected that more than half of shipped chips will have built-in AI processing capability; and by 2026, this proportion may rise to 60%—70%.

This means A-King Micro’s chip product matrix is undergoing a qualitative shift. AI computing power has moved from an “optional feature” to a “standard configuration.” These computing powers are no longer limited to simple graphic recognition; instead, they support increasingly complex edge-side intelligent tasks, ranging from face detection and behavior analysis to voice interaction and multimodal fusion.

“In the future, devices that do not support AI will see their value significantly reduced. The company’s positioning and development trajectory are aligning with this irreversible trend.” Hu Shengfa said. This is the natural outcome of the company’s 25 years of technological accumulation and the evolution of the market, and also the direction of the company’s proactive strategic choice.

More than four years’ worth of chip R&D in 2025

If the strategic shift and market positioning sketch the blueprint, then strong R&D execution capability is the foundation for turning the blueprint into reality. Hu Shengfa views the company’s listing as an accelerator for the company’s development, not an endpoint.

As a seasoned marathon enthusiast, Hu Shengfa often compares entrepreneurship to a long battle. After returning from Silicon Valley in 2000, Hu Shengfa experienced the full process of China’s chip industry growing from barren to thriving. Looking back, Hu Shengfa appears calm; this kind of long-termism—being able to “hold out”—is reflected in A-King Micro’s perseverance in technological breakthroughs and its determination to speed up product iteration.

“After we rang the bell for the listing on June 27, 2023, we didn’t celebrate; management immediately threw itself wholeheartedly into the next round of R&D.” Hu Shengfa said in the conversation. After listing, the pressure is greater, but the ample funding brought by fundraising means R&D investment is no longer constrained. The most direct result shows up in product release speed: “In the year 2025 alone, the number of chip product releases our R&D team delivered exceeded the total number released in the previous four years (2021—2024).”

8 models, 16 chips in total—covering multiple brand-new directions

A-King Micro’s management introduced that over the past four years, on average the company launched about 1—2 chip products per year. But in 2025, A-King Micro rolled out 8 models totaling 16 chips at once. These chips are not merely iterations; they cover multiple brand-new directions and performance upgrades.

Hu Shengfa provided a detailed introduction of these R&D results: first, an upgrade of vision chips—an important replacement of the core camera-chip series that has been selling for more than a decade, significantly improving performance and competitiveness; second, AI-dedicated chips—new chips for AI audio glasses and imaging glasses have begun mass production and delivery; third, expansion into new markets—such as the AK2659 chip specifically optimized for machine-vision scenarios, used for robot gesture recognition and human-form tracking; after being listed for just two months, it already received customer orders, enabling entry into blue-ocean markets such as industrial vision; fourth, extended technical innovation—launching the AK5301 photovoltaic charging-management chip, precisely matching the massive market demand for outdoor solar cameras and small-power portable energy-storage devices, deeply integrating the company’s low-power technology advantages with specific application scenarios.

Hu Shengfa said that the dense launch of these chips directly reflects the company’s use of the capital market’s strength after listing—making big investments in R&D and building new moats. They not only enrich the product line, but also significantly enhance the potential for added value and gross margin.

A 300 million RMB acquisition of Sichu Technology

Grabbing scarce, high-impact technology revenue

To become a platform-type chip company, relying solely on internal R&D is not enough. A-King Micro disclosed in 2025 notices that during that year, through two key strategic capital operations, the company clearly demonstrated its determination to complete its technology landscape and secure leading-edge chip technologies.

The first deal is a proposed cash acquisition of about 326 million RMB to buy 85.79% of the equity interest in Sichu Technology (Nanjing) Co., Ltd. At first, the market may have wondered: why acquire a company with a small sales scale and no direct contribution to earnings?

“The core value of Sichu lies in its technological advantages, for example its globally leading ultra-low-power wireless connection technology.” Hu Shengfa said. Sichu’s Bluetooth technology can achieve a communication distance of 1 kilometer, and in complex environments it has extremely high sensitivity and stability, while also maintaining very low power consumption. This technology is a “passport” for entering markets such as high-end wearables, smart home, and industrial IoT.

Shixh Qili Future

Preemptively laying out advanced visual large-model territory

The second deal is leading the investment in a visual large-model company—Shiqi Qili Future (Shenzhen) Technology Co., Ltd.—to obtain a 4% equity stake. This investment is even more forward-looking. Shiqi Qili Future was incubated by the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Digital Economy Research Institute (IDEA), and it has taken over the core team and intellectual property related to the advanced general visual large model DINO-X.

Regarding the significance of investing in Shiqi Qili Future, Hu Shengfa explained: “Investing in Shiqi Qili Future indicates that A-King Micro will have the capability in the future to provide chips for visual intelligence.” Hu Shengfa further said that in the future, for robots and embodied intelligent agents, their “brains” need strong visual understanding capabilities. And visual large models like DINO-X that Shiqi Qili Future has can achieve open-world target detection and understanding, which is the foundation for machine perception of the physical world. As a chip company, A-King Micro needs deep understanding and early layout of the needs for such frontier models in terms of underlying computing power, energy efficiency, and architectures, so as to design more competitive application-specific or optimized chips.

“From multimedia (processing audio and video) to multimodal (integrating vision, audio, language, environment, and other types of information), this is an inevitable path for AI development. By investing to lock in the most frontier visual ‘brain’ technology partners, we do so to ensure our chips ‘bodies’ can run at the very front of the times.” Hu Shengfa concluded. The acquisition of Sichu is “strengthening the present,” while the investment in Shiqi Qili Future is “laying out the future.” Their shared goal is to build platform-based capabilities that are difficult to replicate in low-power edge AI and multimodal intelligent computing.

A blueprint for a platform-based chip company has already taken shape:

Embracing the core competitive weapon in the AI era

Based on 25 years of industry accumulation, the R&D surge after listing, and a precise expansion into external areas, Hu Shengfa believes that A-King Micro is evolving from a “single-product world champion” leading in the niche market of IoT camera chips into a platform-type chip design company with multiple technology lines.

“A platform-type company means more categories of technology, higher integration complexity, and deeper moats.” Hu Shengfa said by analogy with international chip giant Qualcomm. A-King Micro currently has in-house R&D capabilities (in-house IP share is about 75%) across multiple key IPs including vision processing (ISP), audio processing, low-power design, wireless connectivity (Bluetooth/Wi-Fi), and AI computing power. It can also flexibly combine and optimize according to different terminal needs (such as AI glasses, robots, and smart home central controls, etc.).

Industry insiders believe that such system capabilities for chip platformization are especially important in the AI era. A single chip function cannot meet intelligent terminals’ comprehensive requirements for real-time performance, privacy, low power consumption, and cost. By providing SoC solutions that integrate multiple processing units and deeply optimize for specific scenarios, A-King Micro can offer customers an “all-in-one” core AI hardware, reduce customers’ development barriers, and accelerate time-to-market.

Hu Shengfa predicts that as AI penetration accelerates on the edge side and at the terminal side, the company’s platformization advantages will increasingly stand out, and its market share is expected to further increase.

Embracing a new cycle:

Gross margin and sales growth will become key signals for a value reappraisal

In the conversation, regarding the capital market’s attention to the company’s current financial losses, Hu Shengfa did not avoid the topic. However, he hopes investors will focus on the active choices behind the losses and the future trend.

In this regard, Hu Shengfa said: “The current losses largely stem from our unprecedented investment in R&D and talent after the company’s listing. The number of employees has rapidly grown from more than 200 people before listing in 2022 to more than 500 people today. This has attracted a large number of PhDs and high-end talent from top universities, leading to a substantial increase in labor costs. At the same time, the 8 models and 16 chips launched in 2025 also imply high R&D spending and the initial tape-out costs.”

Dense product deployment in the AI field and securing positions with frontier technologies

A strong expectation of a performance rebound in 2026

“These investments are all for the future. As long as we get the products right, growth is inevitable.” He said with full confidence. As these competitive new products released in 2025 gradually ramp up into volume in 2026, together with contributions from new growth drivers such as AI/AR glasses, and by improving product added value through Sichu’s technology, the company’s consolidated gross margin is expected to steadily recover, and the company’s performance will also see clear growth.

“I believe the continued recovery of gross margin and the significant growth in sales will be the most critical financial signals indicating a turning point in the company’s operations and a renewed recognition of the company’s value by the market.” Hu Shengfa concluded. The company is standing at the starting point of a new round of performance growth cycle driven by the widespread adoption of AI.

Patient capital as support

The long-term development of a technology-driven company cannot be separated from alignment with shareholders’ values—especially the patience and support from investment institutions. In reviewing A-King Micro’s development history, Hu Shengfa particularly thanked a series of A-King Micro shareholders, including HFT International, Guangzhou Fund, Guangdong Semiconductor Fund, Yuanhe Puhua, KES Fund, Guangzhou Development Zone Holdings, and others. Worth mentioning in particular is that HFT International has continuously invested and stayed with A-King Micro for as long as 22 years; with unwavering long-termism and extreme patience, it has accompanied the company’s growth and expansion.

“They understand the long investment cycle and periodic fluctuations characteristic of the semiconductor industry, and they have truly achieved the act of accompanying the company’s growth.” Hu Shengfa emphasized. “They will proactively introduce potential partners and customers to us, and even share industry insights—these intangible forms of help are beyond measure.” (CIS)

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