I can't find much information about Novumind (NovuTensor is their product) nor Cambricon. NovuTensor seems to be only doing inference , and only a specific type of inference (judging from their hardware, probably only images), which is a lot simpler to speed up than the training that TPUs do.

I'd take the statement "Unknown Chinese company beating Google with fewer resources and less time" with a huge grain of salt.