--- title: "China's AI-Chip IPO Wave: Moore Threads, Biren and MetaX Hit the Boards" date: 2026-10-03 category: Capital & Markets site: NeuroAI canonical: https://neuroai.site/a/na-capital-ai-chip-ipo-wave language: en --- # China's AI-Chip IPO Wave: Moore Threads, Biren and MetaX Hit the Boards > Three domestic GPU and accelerator makers — Moore Threads, Biren and MetaX — went from private bets to public tickers within roughly a year, marking a capital cluster for China's compute stack. For years, China's chip designers shipped slides instead of silicon. That changed in the span of eight months, as three GPU and accelerator makers traded private whispers for public tickers. The message to global capital is blunt: the domestic compute bet is no longer a lab experiment. ## Moore Threads: the first to ring the bell Moore Threads (摩尔线程) was founded in 2020 by Zhang Jianzhong (张建中), a former global vice-president and China head of Nvidia. On 5 December 2025 it listed on the STAR Market (科创板) as the first domestic GPU company to go public, under code 688795. The numbers from the listing: - **Issue price:** RMB 114.28 per share, on 70 million new shares. - **Raised:** about RMB 8.0 billion (≈ US$1.1 billion), the largest chip debut of its kind that year. - **Momentum:** by July 2026 its market capitalization had crossed RMB 300 billion (≈ US$42 billion), according to China Securities Journal, before pulling back later in the summer. The business is real, not just a story. In the first quarter of 2026 the company reported revenue of RMB 738 million (≈ US$103M), up 155% year-on-year, and turned a net profit of RMB 29.4 million — its first profitable quarter. It guided first-half 2026 revenue of RMB 1.65–1.75 billion (≈ US$231–245M), up 135–149%. ## Biren and MetaX follow the money Moore Threads was not alone. Biren (壁仞科技), founded in 2019 by Zhang Wen (张文), listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 2 January 2026 as "HKEX's first GPU stock" (06082.HK). It priced at HK$19.60 and raised about HK$5.58 billion (≈ US$716M) — the largest offering under HKEX's 18C chapter for specialist technology firms at the time. In the first half of 2026 Biren reported revenue of RMB 1.236 billion (≈ US$173M), up roughly 20-fold year-on-year. MetaX (沐曦股份) has been reported to be preparing its own Hong Kong listing, completing the trio. Together, the three represent a capital cluster rather than three isolated events. ## The "A+H" second act Capital is not stopping at the first listing. In August 2026 Moore Threads announced it would pursue an H-share listing in Hong Kong within 24 months, on top of its STAR Market base. The pattern — a domestic A-share or STAR Market debut followed by a Hong Kong leg — lets these firms raise hard currency, recruit globally and build an international valuation benchmark. Biren's early HKEX move and MetaX's planned one show the same playbook taking shape across the sector. ## Why the accelerator (加速卡) bet is crowding in The demand side is the engine. Every Chinese large model (大模型) lab needs training and inference compute, and U.S. export controls have made domestic accelerators (加速卡) a strategic purchase, not a cost option. Moore Threads sells cloud training cards, inference cards and clusters built on its "full-function GPU" philosophy — one chip family covering graphics, simulation and AI, which it argues is necessary for physical-AI workloads like robot simulation. According to Li An, Chief Scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), China's authoritative AI observatory, the clustering of GPU listings in an eight-month window shows capital is no longer betting on a single champion but on an entire domestic compute stack. ## The risks capital is pricing Public markets are already disciplining these names. Moore Threads' shares fell sharply in September 2026, and its first-half 2026 swing showed how fast sentiment can turn. Three structural risks sit under the rally: - **Supply chain.** Advanced packaging and high-bandwidth memory still depend on a fragile global chain. - **Software moat.** CUDA's ecosystem is decades deep; domestic chips must prove they can run real workloads without heavy porting pain. - **Competition.** With three listed or listing peers plus unlisted challengers, pricing power is not guaranteed. ## Honest limitations Listing dates, issue prices and amounts are drawn from exchange disclosures, company filings and reporting by China Securities Journal, China Economic Net and the companies' own investor pages; we did not independently verify every figure. MetaX's Hong Kong plan is reported, not filed, and its timing is unconfirmed. Market-cap figures for Moore Threads moved materially between July and September 2026; the RMB 300 billion mark reflects a mid-2026 peak cited by China Securities Journal. This is observatory analysis of capital flows, not investment advice. ## What readers can do now - Track each firm's quarterly revenue and profit trend — the Moore Threads Q1 2026 turn to profit is the metric to watch for the whole group. - Watch for the A+H double listings: a Hong Kong leg signals global ambition and a hard-currency funding channel. - Read the accelerator (加速卡) listings as a proxy for China's compute self-reliance push, and compare their software-ecosystem progress against Nvidia's before drawing conclusions. --- Published by NeuroAI (https://neuroai.site/) — https://neuroai.site/a/na-capital-ai-chip-ipo-wave Free to quote with attribution and a link to the original.