SenseTime's AI growth surges, as China advances nationwide initiative

South China Morning Post

August 28, 2025 4 min read

SenseTime has significantly narrowed its losses while achieving robust growth in its generative artificial intelligence business in the first half of 2025, as China pushes a nationwide initiative to advance the AI industry.

The Hong Kong-listed company on Thursday posted revenue of 2.36 billion yuan (US$330 million) for the six months ended June 30, marking a 35.6 per cent increase from a year earlier. Gross profit rose 18.4 per cent year on year to 907.8 million yuan, although gross margin declined to 38.5 per cent from 44.1 per cent owing to rising hardware and data centre infrastructure costs.

The company's adjusted net loss was halved to 1.16 billion yuan, down 50 per cent from 2.33 billion yuan a year earlier.

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Revenue from the generative AI division surged 72.7 per cent to 1.82 billion yuan, increasing its share of total sales to 77 per cent, up from 60.4 per cent a year earlier. SenseTime attributed this to a "tremendous growth" in demand for training, fine-tuning and inference of generative AI models.

SenseTime's shares edged up 0.48 per cent to HK$2.09 ahead of the announcement. The stock has risen 48.2 per cent so far this year.

Xu Li, CEO of SenseTime. Photo: Handout alt=Xu Li, CEO of SenseTime. Photo: Handout >

"The industry's main theme in the first half of this year was multimodal [and] reasoning, combined with AI agents facilitating large-scale adoption," said CEO Xu Li on the earnings call.

He said the company would strategically adjust its operations to align with the State Council's recently announced "AI Plus" initiative. The supply side of the AI industry - including computing power, data and models - would become more engineered and standardised, enhancing efficiency, he said. On the demand side, increased adoption in key industries would pave the way for large-scale deployment.

The "AI Plus" initiative aims for the adoption of intelligent devices and AI agents to reach 70 per cent by 2027 and 90 per cent by 2030.

The policy, along with the release of leading Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek's upgraded V3.1 model, has bolstered investor confidence in the mainland's AI ecosystem, particularly in computing power and domestic chip development.

As China pushes for self-reliance in semiconductors - the foundation of AI infrastructure - SenseTime said it had achieved a heterogeneous cluster of 5,000 chips composed of domestic products. The company's total computing power has grown to about 25,000 petaflops as of August, up from over 23,000 petaflops at the end of 2024.

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