Moore Threads, China's Nvidia, Soars on IPO Debut

Credit: Moore Threads Official Website

Moore Threads, widely recognized as the “Nvidia of China” and the first publicly-listed Chinese GPU company, officially debuted on the STAR Market on Friday.

Its opening price was 650 yuan per share, a staggering 468.78% increase from the offering price of 114.28 yuan per share. The company's total market capitalization exceeded 300 billion yuan, with a single winning lottery bringing a profit of up to 267,860 yuan—making it the most profitable new stock since the full implementation of the A-share registration-based IPO system.

By midday, Moore Threads' stock was trading at 590.59 yuan per share, with its market capitalization soaring from the issuance baseline of 53.715 billion yuan to 277.6 billion yuan. Investors who secured an allocation of 500 shares netted nearly 240,000 yuan in profit.

In just half a day, the share price of Moore Threads surged more than fourfold, with trading volume reaching an impressive 12.592 billion yuan. The entire Chinese chip sector rallied alongside, climbing by nearly 1%. The sector has gained close to 40% this year, far outpacing the broader market.

Moore Threads has unquestionably emerged as the most high-profile IPO of the year. Even though companies like CATL (“King Ning”) and Mixue Bingcheng (“King of Ice”) have also gone public this year, breaking IPO records, their level of attention still pales in comparison to Moore Threads.

Dubbed as China's Nvidia

The explosion of artificial intelligence has thrust chipmakers back into the spotlight of global capital markets. Nvidia, the undisputed leader in AI chips, became the first company to reach a $4 trillion market cap this year, and even briefly exceeded $5 trillion at the end of October.

In China, there is a similar enthusiasm for finding the “local Nvidia.” Among all the contenders for the title of “Nvidia of China,” Moore Threads’ core team stands out as the most legitimate bearer of the name.

Moore Threads was established in June 2020 and officially started operations in October of the same year. Its founder, majority shareholder, chairman, and CEO, Zhang Jianzhong, was born in 1966. Since 1990, he has held positions at the Metallurgical Automation Research and Design Institute, HP, and Dell. In 2006, he joined Nvidia as Global Vice President and General Manager for Greater China, holding that role until September 2020, when he left to found Moore Threads.

Among the Moore Threads team, co-founders and board members Zhou Yuan and Zhang Jianzhong previously worked together at both HP and Nvidia. From October 2004 to September 2020, Zhou served as Senior Director of Market Ecosystem at Nvidia. Another co-founder, board member, and Deputy General Manager, Dr. Zhang Yubo, also worked as a GPU architect at Nvidia. In addition, several senior executives in the company’s sales and technical divisions have prior experience at Nvidia.

Similar to Nvidia, Moore Threads’ main business is based on GPUs, focusing on full-featured GPUs as the core, and providing global accelerated computing infrastructure as well as one-stop solutions.

In terms of business model, Moore Threads has also adopted the Fabless (no in-house manufacturing) model just like Nvidia. From a product perspective, both Nvidia and Moore Threads cover cloud and edge computing scenarios.

However, Moore Threads also emphasizes its points of differentiation from Nvidia in its prospectus.

Moore Threads claims that its own product portfolio is based on full-featured GPU boards, integrated machines, and cluster devices, covering cloud, edge, and endpoint scenarios. Compared to Nvidia, which specializes in AI-focused GPUs, Moore Threads places greater emphasis on building a product ecosystem based on full-featured GPUs that integrate graphic processing, AI computing, physics simulation, and other capabilities.

Moreover, among the many domestic startups benchmarking against Nvidia, Moore Threads was one of the earliest to achieve mass production and commercialization in the domestic market. From 2022 to 2024, the company’s compound annual revenue growth rate reached an impressive 208.44%. In 2025, revenue is estimated to increase by between 177.79% and 241.65% year-on-year.

Since Moore Threads announced that the funds raised would primarily be used for R&D projects such as next-generation, independently controllable AI training/inference unified chips, next-generation graphic chips, and next-generation AI SoC chips, it has drawn increasing attention from the market.

On June 30 this year, Moore Threads’ IPO application was accepted, and it successfully passed the review process on September 26, taking just 88 days and setting the record for the fastest approval this year.

On November 24, Moore Threads launched its IPO subscription, with an issue price of 114.28 yuan per share—the highest listing price on the STAR Market this year. The company issued 70 million new shares, accounting for 14.89% of its total share capital after issuance. This brings the total fundraising amount to nearly 8 billion yuan, also the highest on the STAR Market this year, and second only to Huadian New Energy on the main board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange across the entire A-share market.

On the day of the IPO, “scrambling to buy Moore Threads” became the focus of the market, even breaking out of industry circles and sparking widespread discussion. The company saw nearly 1,600 times the offline subscription multiple, with close to 5 million investors vying for shares and more than 250 institutional investors placing bids. In the end, the winning rate was less than 0.04%, marking the lowest of the year. On investor forums and social media, posts showing “Sorry, you didn’t win the lottery”—dubbed “missed-out posts”—became trending topics and set off a wave of copycat posts.

The fervor ignited by Moore Threads reflects the market’s bet on domestically made AI chips and domestic chip substitution.

High-end chips have long been seen as a major bottleneck for the development of AI in China. Now, a wave of domestic chip substitution centered on GPUs is gaining momentum.

According to data from Frost & Sullivan, China’s GPU market was about 38.477 billion yuan in 2020 and is expected to reach 163.817 billion yuan by 2024. Since the beginning of this year, as large AI models continue to gain traction, the demand and production capacity for GPUs have exploded simultaneously.

Moreover, due to factors like geopolitical tensions, mainstream AI chips from companies like Nvidia and AMD can no longer enter the Chinese market through legal channels.

Take Nvidia, for example, which holds around 90% of the global GPU market share. In fiscal year 2024, its revenue from the Chinese market reached as high as $17.1 billion, accounting for about 13% of its total revenue. However, after the U.S. imposed chip export restrictions on China in the second quarter of this year, a series of changes have made it nearly impossible for Nvidia’s products to enter China. CEO Jensen Huang even admitted that the company’s market share in China had “fallen from 95% to 0%.”

According to the company's financial report for the third fiscal quarter, Nvidia’s sales in China for the quarter were just $50 million, with no major bulk orders fulfilled. Nvidia and AMD have also stopped including sales forecasts for the Chinese market in their quarterly earnings guidance.

Domestic substitution has thus been pushed even more into the spotlight. Publicly listed chipmaker Cambricon has earned the nickname “Han King,” with its stock price at one point surpassing that of Kweichow Moutai. The “AI made-in-China supply chain” concept, focusing on domestic replacements and independent, controllable technology, has produced market buzzwords like “Ji Lianhai”—a term referencing Cambricon, Foxconn Industrial Internet, and Hygon Information. Meanwhile, the “Four GPU Rising Stars” led by Moore Threads are even more highly anticipated.

Right on Moore Threads’ heels is Metax. On November 13, as Moore Threads released its IPO prospectus, Metax's application for a STAR Market IPO was approved. On December 3, while Moore Threads announced its listing date, Metax also finalized its issue price, becoming the second new stock on the STAR Market this year with an issue price over 100 Yuan per share, at 104.66 yuan.

As Moore Threads began trading today, Muxi Co., Ltd. also opened for subscription. The company’s founder, Chen Weiliang, is a former senior director at AMD. According to the announcement, the nearly 4 billion yuan being raised in this round will mainly be invested in projects such as the R&D and industrialization of new high-performance general-purpose GPUs, the R&D and industrialization of next-generation AI inference GPUs, and the development of high-performance GPU technologies for cutting-edge fields and emerging application scenarios.

Among the other two companies in the so-called “Four Rising Stars of Chinese GPUs”—Enflame Technology and Biren Technology—both have also launched their IPO processes.

However, for domestic startup chip companies, profitability remains the next major hurdle to overcome. Although their revenues continue to surge, it is still difficult for them to cover R&D expenses. Moore Threads reported a loss of 1.6 billion yuan in 2024, with the loss for the first half of this year narrowed to 270 million yuan.

Still, Moore Threads anticipates that as large language models, embodied AI, autonomous driving, and other AI applications continue to break new ground, China’s demand for computing power will keep increasing, leading to sustained growth in the domestic GPU market. The company expects its revenue to maintain steady growth, with the possibility of achieving consolidated profitability as soon as 2027. Muxi states that it may reach the break-even point as early as 2026.

Of course, China’s GPU industry is still in its early stages. Companies such as Moore Threads also acknowledge that Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem maintains a monopoly in the industry, meaning future business expansion will face increasingly high R&D challenges and difficulties in building a compatible computing ecosystem.

Nonetheless, the market is highly optimistic about the prospects of the domestic GPU industry. Frost & Sullivan predicts that the size of China’s GPU market will reach 1.3 trillion RMB by 2029, nearly ten times its current scale over the next five years. (Reporting by Hu Jiameng, Editing by Li Chengcheng)