Sensetime’s generative AI growth pushes revenue up 21% in first half

Revenue for the Chinese AI giant reached US$244.3 million for the first six months of 2024, but traditional AI revenue has more than halved

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SenseTime Group’s office at Hong Kong Science Park on May 29, 2024. The Chinese AI giant has been leaning heavily on generative AI to drive growth as revenue from traditional AI services falls. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 3:00pm, 28 Aug 2024

Chinese artificial intelligence giant SenseTime has seen revenue jump more than 20 per cent this year on the back of strong growth from its generative AI (GenAI) business, as the decade-old pioneer in the domestic industry strives to turn a profit.

SenseTime revenue for the first half of the year increased 21.4 per cent year on year to 1.74 billion yuan (US$244.3 million), the company said in financial results published on Tuesday.

Half-year revenue from its GenAI business – including AI data centres and large language models (LLMs), the technology underpinning products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT – surged 256 per cent from a year earlier to 1.05 billion yuan, accounting for 60 per cent of its total revenue, according to the company.

GenAI has become the company’s “dominant business”, driven by demand for its LLMs and AI computing infrastructure services in the Chinese market, SenseTime said in its report. But revenue from what the company calls traditional AI, which consists mainly of its Smart City services, has decreased 50.6 per cent year on year.

CEO and co-founder Xu Li told the Post in May this year that SenseTime is aiming to become profitable within the next two years, with GenAI as its growth engine.

The company reported 2.4 billion yuan in losses in the six months ended June, narrowing 21.2 per cent from the same period last year. Full-year losses for 2023 stood at 6.49 billion yuan, according to its 2023 results.