Chinese AI Chip Startup MetaX Surges On Trading Debut

Shares of Chinese chip startup MetaX Integrated Circuits rose more than sixfold in its trading debut on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's tech-focused STAR market on Wednesday, underscoring bullish investor sentiment over the country's push to become self-sufficient in cutting edge semiconductors.

The Shanghai-based company's shares opened at 700 yuan, compared to its offering price of 104.66 yuan, giving it a market capitalization of 280 billion yuan ($39.8 billion). It raised about 4.2 billion yuan from its initial public offering.

Founded in 2020 by former executives at U.S. chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, MetaX is a fabless designer of graphic processing units (GPUs) used in training and running AI models. MetaX has acknowledged that its chip technology lags behind Nvidia's, but that has not stopped investors from scrambling for a slice of the company.

Fueling the bullish sentiment is Beijing's push to become self-sufficient in cutting edge chips and cut its reliance on U.S. technology, which encourages domestic companies to adopt products from homegrown alternatives like the ones made by MetaX. U.S. President Donald Trump's recent announcement that it will let Nvidia sell its H200 chips to China has done little to cool the momentum.

"China's computing-power infrastructure has long relied on overseas technology giants," MetaX said in its IPO prospectus. "Against the backdrop of escalating geopolitical frictions and the new wave of the artificial-intelligence revolution, accelerating the build-out of domestically produced computing power and ensuring the autonomy and controllability of the industrial supply chain have become matters of pressing urgency."

MetaX reported 1.23 billion yuan in revenue for the first nine months of this year, more than five times higher than a year ago, but a net loss of 345.5 million yuan. The company said it has sold more than 25,000 GPUs so far, but the prospectus also notes that Yuanlu Jiajia, a minority shareholder, is also a major customer and accounted for 28% of its revenue in the first quarter.

In the prospectus, MetaX also warned that against the backdrop of the U.S.-China tech rivalry, it is facing "unfavorable restrictions in advanced process wafer foundry services and HBM supply due to relevant U.S. government policies." HBM refers to high-bandwidth memory, which is used in combination with GPUs to process vast amounts of data in AI data centers.

The blockbuster listing follows Moore Threads, another GPU developer that listed earlier this month. After shares soared more than eightfold from its offering price, the company warned investors that its new products have yet to generate revenue and that it still expects to be lossmaking this year. The stock price has since dropped by more than 20%.

Source: Asia_Nikkei