- The AI chipmaker opened at 410 yuan, valuing the company at more than 176 billion yuan
- Its debut completes the listings of China’s four leading homegrown GPU makers, intensifying competition in AI computing
Enflame (燧原科技) surged 188% in its Shanghai debut on September 11, giving the Chinese AI-chip maker a market value of more than 170 billion yuan ($25.3 billion) and highlighting investor enthusiasm for domestic alternatives to Nvidia.
Shares opened at 410 yuan, compared with an IPO price of 142.18 yuan. At that price, investors who won one standard 500-share lot would have a paper gain of about 133,900 yuan.
Enflame issued 43.04 million shares in the IPO and expects to raise about 6.12 billion yuan. Founded in 2018, the company develops cloud-based AI chips and has independently developed four generations of architectures and five AI chip products.
Its revenue rose from 301 million yuan in 2023 to 990 million yuan in 2025, a compound annual growth rate of 81.3%.
Revenue reached 1.12 billion yuan in the first half of 2026, up 279% from a year earlier. The company expects to achieve consolidated profitability in 2026 or 2027.
Joining the quartet
Enflame is one of the companies known in China as the “GPU quartet,” alongside Moore Threads (摩尔线程), MetaX (沐曦股份) and Biren Technology (壁仞科技).
With Enflame’s listing, all four have now entered China’s capital markets, marking a new phase for the country’s homegrown AI-chip industry.
The four companies are taking different approaches to GPU technology. Moore Threads, MetaX and Biren have pursued general-purpose GPU architectures designed to be compatible with Nvidia’s CUDA software ecosystem.
Divergent paths
Enflame has instead opted for a domain-specific architecture, or DSA, approach and built its own full-stack software platform, TopsRider.
Enflame also has close ties with Tencent, which owns about 20% of the company and is its largest customer. Tencent and its affiliates accounted for more than 83% of Enflame’s revenue in 2025, underscoring both the strength of the partnership and the company’s heavy reliance on a single customer group.
For global semiconductor investors, Enflame’s debut offers a glimpse into the rapid capitalization of China’s AI-chip industry.
Its IPO valuation implied a price-to-sales ratio of about 61.8 times, far above Nvidia’s roughly 25 times, reflecting the premium investors are putting on China’s drive to reduce its reliance on foreign AI-chip suppliers.
The scale and profit test
With all four companies now public, the competition is moving beyond technical validation.
Their next challenge will be to demonstrate that they can deliver chips at scale, build effective hardware-software ecosystems, iterate products quickly and turn large R&D investments into sustainable profits.
The emergence of four publicly traded Chinese GPU makers pursuing different technology paths also points to a more competitive domestic AI-chip market, even as Nvidia remains the dominant player globally.
Header image credit: Enflame
