Amicro Technology, the Zhuhai-based chipmaker whose navigation silicon powers robot vacuums from Xiaomi, iRobot and Ecovacs, raised HK$709.7 million (about $90.5 million) in its Hong Kong IPO. The company, formerly known as Amicro Semiconductor before rebranding in 2025, priced shares at HK$9.90, below the HK$10.43 midpoint of its HK$9.27-to-HK$11.58 range. Shares still opened 37.6% higher on debut and climbed as much as 81% by the morning close, according to Dealroom.
Amicro plans to put roughly 70% of net proceeds into software, hardware and robot-dedicated AI chips, extending a product line that already underpins navigation and mapping for eight of the world's top ten cleaning-robot makers. Revenue rose to RMB406.7 million in 2025, though the company posted a net loss of RMB155.1 million for the year.
Why a pricing miss still drew a buying frenzy
A below-range IPO followed by an 81% pop looks contradictory, but it reflects a split market. Hong Kong retail investors subscribed 13.95 times the available shares, betting on China's robotics boom, while international institutional buyers covered just 1.05 times their allocation — barely enough to clear. That gap suggests global investors are more cautious about near-term profitability in China's robot-component supply chain than local retail traders chasing the physical-AI theme.
Amicro's founding business was simple-navigation chips for vacuums, a market that is now mature and commoditized. The IPO money is explicitly earmarked to move the company upstream into AI-capable chips built for a broader category of robots, not just vacuums, as competition for perception and motion-control silicon intensifies.
A crowded race for the robot's "brain"
Amicro is not the only chip supplier chasing this shift. Nvidia's Jetson and Thor platforms dominate high-end humanoid and industrial robot compute, while Chinese challengers like MetaX-and-UBTech-backed Xilect are racing to build domestic alternatives aimed specifically at humanoid and industrial robots. Amicro's advantage is distribution: it already ships into millions of consumer robots a year, giving it a cost and volume base that newer entrants lack.
Its disadvantage is that consumer cleaning robots are a lower-margin, lower-complexity category than the humanoid and industrial robots drawing most AI chip investment today. Whether Amicro can credibly move into higher-value silicon with a single IPO's proceeds — against well-capitalized rivals — is the real test ahead. The company's shift mirrors a broader pattern in China's robotics supply chain, where component makers are racing to add AI features before margins get squeezed further by price competition.
Watch for Amicro's first robot-dedicated AI chip announcements and whether its existing vacuum-maker customers adopt them, which would validate the upstream push the IPO money is meant to fund.