RMB

RMB is the abbreviation for Renminbi, the currency of the People’s Republic of China. The name literally means “the people’s currency.” In international payments it carries the code CNY.

Renminbi and yuan do not mean exactly the same thing, but they are often used interchangeably. Renminbi is the name of the currency, yuan is its unit of account — similar to how the British currency is called pound sterling and counted in pounds. A price is therefore given as “100 yuan,” not “100 renminbi”; but the currency as a whole is called Renminbi. One yuan is divided into 10 jiao, one jiao into 10 fen.

Converting

Reference rates are quoted in the form “1 euro = 7.80 yuan.” So the number states how many yuan one euro costs — not the other way around. This direction of reading is the most common source of error when converting.

To convert from yuan to euro you therefore divide: amount in yuan ÷ rate = amount in euro. To convert from euro to yuan you multiply: amount in euro × rate = amount in yuan.

An example at a rate of 7.80: a server price of 39,000 yuan corresponds to 39,000 ÷ 7.80 = 5,000 euro. Conversely, 250 euro in cloud costs are 250 × 7.80 = 1,950 yuan.

Larger amounts in Chinese sources are often given in yi (亿), i.e. in units of one hundred million. A funding round of “5 yi yuan” is 500 million yuan, which at a rate of 7.80 is roughly 64 million euro. Anyone who overlooks the unit miscalculates by a factor of one hundred million — a mistake that occurs regularly in reports about Chinese AI companies.

CNY and CNH

The renminbi is traded on two separate markets. CNY is the onshore rate, which China’s central bank steers daily within a fixed trading band. CNH is the freely tradable offshore rate, traded mainly in Hong Kong. The two rates usually move closely together, but in tense periods they can drift apart noticeably — observers then read the gap as an indication of how the market would value the currency without state control.

The converter on this page uses the European Central Bank’s reference rate and therefore the onshore rate CNY.

Why this matters for AI topics

Funding rounds, data center investments, and chip budgets of Chinese companies are reported in yuan. Without conversion, the magnitudes cannot be compared to Western figures — and because the exchange rate fluctuates, the ratio shifts noticeably over the years.