Shanghai Enflame Technology, one of China’s leading artificial intelligence chipmakers and a domestic rival to Nvidia, surged more than 200 per cent on its market debut on Friday, highlighting strong investor demand for homegrown semiconductor companies.
Shares priced at roughly $20 apiece in the offering opened at about $58, an immediate 188 per cent jump, before climbing to an intraday high of nearly $67, a gain of 234 per cent from the issue price, on Shanghai's tech-focused STAR Market.
The retail portion of the IPO was oversubscribed 4,073 times, with roughly seven million online investors submitting orders for 42.1 billion shares. The allocation rate for individual investors was just 0.025 per cent, among the lowest of any mainland listing this year. Enflame raised 6.12 billion yuan, or about $913 million, in the offering.
Backed by Tencent, Enflame designs AI chips for training and inference and is considered one of China's “four little dragons” of AI chipmaking. It was the last of the group to go public.
The other three, MetaX, Moore Threads and Biren, all recorded similarly dramatic gains on their trading debuts.MetaX soared nearly 700 per cent in December, Moore Threads gained more than 400 per cent in the same month, and Biren jumped 76 per cent when it listed in January.
The scale of investor appetite reflects a broader trend across China's markets, with traders betting that domestic chipmakers can capture a meaningful share of the AI accelerator market currently dominated by foreign suppliers.
According to IDC data cited in Enflame's prospectus, international chipmakers led by Nvidia accounted for nearly 60 per cent of China's AI accelerator market in 2025, leaving substantial room for local players to expand as Beijing pushes for greater semiconductor self-sufficiency amid continuing U.S. export restrictions.
Enflame is not yet profitable and remains heavily reliant on Tencent. Its revenue grew 37 per cent last year, a solid increase but not one that would typically justify a debut surge of more than 200 per cent on fundamentals alone.
The company said it plans to use IPO proceeds to develop and commercialise its fifth- and sixth-generation AI chips, aiming to eventually match high-end products from international rivals such as Nvidia.
The listing follows a similar frenzy in July, when shares of memory-chip maker CXMT soared nearly 466 per cent on their STAR Market debut, briefly making it the most valuable Chinese-listed company.
Analysts have noted an increasingly familiar pattern: heavily subsidised, loss-making chip start-ups are going public amid extraordinary retail demand, driven less by near-term earnings prospects than by the strategic push to reduce China's dependence on U.S. technology.
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