Shanghai Enflame Technology jumped 188% on its STAR Market debut on Friday, giving one of Nvidia's most closely watched Chinese challengers a market capitalization of about 176 billion yuan (US$26.3 billion) and cementing Beijing's push for domestic AI silicon.
The IPO by the numbers
Enflame, backed by Tencent since its 2018 founding, sold 43.04 million shares at an issue price of 142.18 yuan, raising 6.12 billion yuan (about $912 million). Shares opened at 410 yuan and traded as high as 475 yuan before settling around 430 yuan. Retail demand was extreme: the public tranche was oversubscribed more than 4,073 times, with about 7 million online investors submitting orders and an individual allocation rate of just 0.025%.
The debut stood out against a soft session for Chinese equities. The Star 50 fell 1.3% at the open, while the CSI 300 slid 0.9%. Tencent, still Enflame's largest shareholder with about 17.95% post-IPO, accounted for nearly 84% of Enflame's 2025 revenue, according to its prospectus.
The last of China's four little dragons
Enflame is the last of China's so-called "four little dragons" of AI accelerators — a group that includes Moore Threads, MetaX and Biren Technology — to list on the mainland. Founded by former AMD executives Zhao Lidong and Zhang Yalin, the company builds GPGPUs for cloud AI training and has quietly cooperated with local governments on computing hubs in Wuxi and elsewhere.
Revenue climbed 37% last year to about 990 million yuan, while the net loss narrowed to 1.16 billion yuan from 1.51 billion. Management has flagged 2026 or 2027 as a plausible breakeven window.
Export controls keep splitting the AI stack
The listing lands as U.S. export controls continue to reshape the Chinese AI compute base. Alibaba and Huawei are pushing their own accelerators (see Huawei's Ascend 950DT push), while DeepSeek is running its models on domestic silicon in V4.1-Flash. Enflame's $26 billion first-day valuation — for a company that is still loss-making — is a market verdict on how concentrated Chinese demand is behind national champions that can substitute for restricted Nvidia GPUs.
Reporting based on coverage from the South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asia and TechStartups.