The 26th China International Industry Fair opened in Shanghai on October 12, featuring a first-ever independently established integrated circuit exhibition zone, "National Chip Expo." The shift itself marks the deepening integration of industry and chips — moving from upstream and downstream supply toward deep fusion.
Manufacturing, equipment and materials leaders including SMIC, Hua Hong, AMEC and Shanghai Silicon Industry appeared together with AI chip companies such as MetaX, Enflame, Iluvatar CoreX and Orientcompute, and the top three domestic EDA firms were all present.
On the show floor, "super-nodes" replaced single cards as the core product on which compute companies compete. MetaX exhibited the Sijing S600 super-node, an integrated whole-cabinet design with 64 fully interconnected cards per cabinet and horizontal expansion to 10,000-card scale. Iluvatar CoreX showed the TianGai 300 IXL144 with 144 GPUs and 18 CPUs per cabinet. Enflame brought the orthogonal-architecture YunXi ESL64-O, developed together with ZTE, using high-density integration and a zero-cable design to compress communication latency and improve cooling and signal integrity. Orientcompute presented the Huishuan HS256 cluster, built on two cabinets housing eight standard liquid-cooled servers, delivering 33 PFLOPS of FP16 per super-node, with thousand-card clusters slated for delivery by year end.
Beyond Nvidia, which has achieved large-scale global commercial deployment, super-node solutions from most other vendors remain at different stages of rollout, forming a layered picture of "scaled commercial use by leaders, rapid penetration by the rest." 2026 is widely recognized in the industry as the first year of scaled adoption for domestic super-nodes. Notably, industrial AI has moved from concept displays onto production lines, becoming the key entry point for chipmakers into industrial scenarios.
Source: 21st Century Business Herald / Tencent News
