Approaching.AI raises over RMB 1.3B Series B to build inference token factories on domestic chips
The AMW Read
A sub-$500M round for a known Chinese inference-infra player, but its state-backed token-factory model on mixed domestic chips adds a meaningful datapoint for CN inference supply.
Approaching.AI raises over RMB 1.3B Series B to build inference token factories on domestic chips
Approaching.AI (趋境科技), which sells AI inference output by the token, has closed a Series B of more than RMB 1.3 billion (~$180M), Leiphone reported. Zhecai Innovation, Xiaoshan Capital, ICBC Investment, Zhongguancun Science City, Xinglian Capital and Qianjiang Century City co-led the round. SenseTime and Wangsu Science & Technology joined as followers. The round comes three months after its Series A in July and brings 2026 funding to RMB 2.4 billion (~$335M). The money will go to token capacity, its ATaaS (Token as a Service) platform, inference R&D and delivery. The company says daily token output grew more than 100x in six months to over one trillion tokens. It says revenue so far this year is close to ten times last year's total, and that the business now covers its costs.
The pitch is that inference capacity is sold as an output, measured in tokens, not as rented GPUs. Approaching.AI says it splits prefill and decode across different chips and converts KV caches between them. That lets models with more than a trillion parameters run on Chinese accelerators from partners such as Moore Threads, MetaX and Iluvatar CoreX. It claims better cost-performance than the leading foreign hardware. Local state capital drives much of the buildout. Henan runs a joint operation, a Hangzhou facility is planned at the 10,000-card scale, and Hainan uses a model where the state builds and Approaching.AI operates. The team also started the open-source KTransformers project and helped found Mooncake.
For investors, the open question is whether operating software can turn idle, mixed domestic chip fleets into profitable token supply. Revenue backed by state co-investment will need checking against demand from paying enterprise customers.
