Shares of Shanghai Enflame Technology Co. closed 179% higher today following an initial public offering that raised 6.12 billion yuan, or about $912 billion.
The listing drew particularly strong demand from retail investors. Such investors ordered 6,109 times more shares than the number Enflame had made available as part of its retail allocation. The company grew the allocation in response and sold a total of 43.04 million shares, or about 10% of its outstanding stock.
Enflame’s closing price gives it a market capitalization of 171 billion yuan, which equals $25.5 billion.
Enflame launched in 2018 to develop artificial intelligence chips for data centers. The company debuted its first accelerator, the DTU 1.0, the following year. It featured 14 billion transistors made using GlobalFoundries Inc.’s 12-nanometer node. Enflame developed three more iterations of its architecture over the subsequent years.
The company debuted its newest chip, the fourth-generation L600, last July. It’s capable of running both training and inference workloads. The chip features a 114-gigabyte RAM module that provides 3.6 terabits per second of memory bandwidth.
The L600 uses HBM3, a memory variety that provides significantly more bandwidth than standard server-grade RAM. Nvidia Corp.’s latest Rubin graphics card uses a newer version of the technology called HBM4. It provides more than twice as much bandwidth as HBM3.
Enflame’s revenue is growing rapidly. Its sales increased by 37% in 2025, to 990.2 million yuan, or about $147 million. The company estimates that its revenue more than doubled in the first nine months of this year to between 2.3 billion and 3 billion yuan.
Reuters reported that Enflame’s largest customer is Shenzhen-based social media giant Tencent Holdings Inc. It accounted for more than 83% of the chipmaker’s 2025 revenue. Furthermore, Tencent is Enflame’s biggest shareholder with a 17.95% post-IPO stake.
Losses narrowed by 25% last year to 1.16 billion yuan. The company expects to become profitable in late 2026 or 2027. It will use the proceeds from its IPO to develop fifth- and sixth-generation machine learning accelerators.
Enflame is the fourth Chinese AI chip developer to have gone public in the past year. It was preceded by Biren, MetaX and Moore Threads, which saw similar share price spikes following their trading debuts. All three companies continue to trade above their opening prices.
Nvidia Corp. rivals outside China are also drawing significant investor interest. Several AI chip startups including Positron AI Inc., Etched Inc. and Velaura AI Inc. have raised nine-figure funding rounds in recent months.
Nvidia is also facing competition from some of its customers. The industry’s three largest cloud providers have all developed custom AI chips. In June, OpenAI Group PBC joined the fray with an inference accelerator called Jalapeño that it says provides better performance per watt than off-the-shelf graphics cards. Anthropic PBC is also working on custom chips.
