by XU Meihui
Moore Threads jumped 468% on its Shanghai STAR Market debut on Dec.5, becoming China's first publicly traded GPU maker. The surge highlights how Beijing's push for localized high-end computing hardware is reshaping capital markets and intensifying competition with Nvidia.
Shares opened at 650 yuan, valuing the five-year-old company at more than 300 billion yuan (about US$42 billion). Analysts say the surge reflects strong appetite for AI-infrastructure plays and the strategic premium investors are assigning to semiconductor firms as the US tightens export controls on advanced chips.
"This is a milestone for China's wider GPU industry," said CHENG Hengxiang, a strategist covering the semiconductor and AI-hardware sectors. "It reflects the country's urgency in addressing bottlenecks in high-end computing."
Moore Threads' IPO was approved in just 88 days, one of the fastest on the STAR Market. The company raised 8 billion yuan via a 114.28-yuan offering—the priciest A-share IPO this year—despite a revenue base still in early stages of scaling.
Chipmakers linked to China's self-reliance drive have often commanded elevated valuations. Investors are effectively pricing in policy support and the country's accelerating demand for AI training and inference capacity, even though profitability remains years away.
Founded in 2020, Moore Threads describes itself as an "all-function GPU" developer. Its self-developed MUSA architecture is designed to support AI acceleration, graphics rendering, scientific computing and simulation workloads, and is compatible with mainstream GPU ecosystems, according to the company. CEO ZHANG Jianzhong said several performance indicators of the company's chips have approached — and in some cases matched — those of leading international products.
Revenue climbed from 46 million yuan in 2022 to 702 million yuan in the first half of 2025, but losses widened to 271 million yuan, and the company does not expect to reach consolidated profitability before 2027. R&D spending totaled 3.8 billion yuan over the past three years, far exceeding cumulative revenue.
Investors include Lenovo, Tencent, Shenzhen Capital Group, China Mobile and Hongshan (formerly Sequoia Capital China). Zhang spent 15 years at Nvidia as a global vice president and China head, and the prospectus shows that many of Moore Threads’ senior managers and core technical staff also come from the US chipmaker.
Moore Threads was placed on the US Entity List in 2023, restricting its access to US-origin tools, IP and design software. The company says it is reshaping its supply chain, though replacing advanced-workflow suppliers "may raise costs and lengthen product cycles."
Moore Threads is part of China's so-called "Four Dragons" of GPU startups—alongside MetaX, Birentech and Enflame—all racing to secure capital for rapid product iterations and to compete for cloud-provider procurement.
MetaX has received approval to list, Birentech is reportedly pursuing a Hong Kong IPO, and Enflame has resumed IPO preparation. "Everyone is racing to secure capital," said an executive close to the companies. "If you miss this window, the pressure only grows — every year feels like a fight for survival."
A senior systems-integrator executive told Jiemian News that their products are now designed to support multiple domestic GPUs, allowing users to switch between MetaX, Birentech, Moore Threads and Enflame on the same platform — a level of flexibility he expects to become a major trend. He expects "over 80% of new data-center deployments in China" to adopt Chinese GPU cards within two to three years, assuming vendors can iterate fast enough.
He said domestic GPUs still trail overseas products in bandwidth and single-card performance, though system-level design and optimized interconnects can help narrow the gap in real deployments. Zhang said domestic GPU development still faces steep technical barriers and requires years of system-level investment — factors that will determine how quickly Chinese vendors can narrow the gap with global leaders. For Moore Threads, the real test starts now.
