China’s first publicly listed general-purpose GPU company has officially made its debut. Moore Threads rang the opening bell on Tuesday, opening at about 650 yuan, 469% above its 114.28 yuan offering price. That gave it an opening market value of more than 305.5 billion yuan. From the time its IPO was accepted on June 30 to its successful approval on September 26, Moore Threads took just 88 days, setting a STAR Market record for the fastest IPO approval. Founder and CEO Zhang Jianzhong has spent nearly two decades in the GPU industry, and before starting the company he was NVIDIA’s China general manager.

Before moving toward its IPO, Moore Threads completed several financing rounds and raised a total of tens of billions of yuan. By the time it rang the bell, the company had assembled a heavyweight investor lineup that included China Mobile, Shenzhen Capital Group, Shanghai State-owned Capital Investment, BOCI, CICC Capital, China Merchants Venture, Zhongguancun Science City, Sequoia Capital and other well-known state-backed and venture capital firms. Moore Threads, billed as the first domestically listed GPU company, has just rung the bell. The “first domestic GPU stock” has debuted on the STAR Market and officially gone public.

After the company’s initial public offering, its total share capital will be 470 million shares, including 70 million shares sold in the offering. The issue price was 114.28 yuan per share, raising 8 billion yuan in gross proceeds, a new high for A-share listings this year. The stock opened at 650 yuan, 469% above the issue price, giving it a market value of more than 305.5 billion yuan at the open. According to the prospectus, the 8 billion yuan raised in this offering will mainly be used for research and development.

Of the total, 2.509 billion yuan will go to Moore Threads’ next-generation independently controllable AI training and inference chip R&D project, 2.502 billion yuan will fund its next-generation independently controllable graphics chip R&D project, and 1.981 billion yuan will be used for its next-generation independently controllable AI SoC chip R&D project. In the first three quarters of this year, Moore Threads reported revenue of 780 million yuan, up 182% year on year.

Net loss for the first three quarters also narrowed to 720 million yuan, down from 890 million yuan a year earlier. Just as striking as the company’s explosive revenue growth is a fundamental shift in its revenue mix: Moore Threads has moved its strategic focus away from early desktop products and toward the high-performance, high-margin AI computing segment. In 2022, desktop graphics acceleration products made up 71.44% of revenue.

By 2024, AI computing products had surged ahead, generating 336 million yuan in revenue and accounting for 77.63% of annual sales. In the first half of this year, AI computing products had become the company’s clear revenue pillar, with their share of revenue rising to 94.85% and revenue reaching 665 million yuan. Moore Threads: Founded in June 2020, Moore Threads, often described as China’s version of NVIDIA, has registered capital of 330 million yuan.

Its de facto controller is Zhang Jianzhong, who holds 44.07% of the company’s shares. Before founding Moore Threads, Zhang served as NVIDIA’s global vice president and general manager for China. During more than 15 years at NVIDIA, he helped build out a complete GPU ecosystem in China and turned Greater China into one of NVIDIA’s most important markets worldwide. Since its founding in 2020, the company has drawn close attention from the capital markets and once achieved unicorn status in just 100 days.

When the company formally kicked off its IPO process last November, it was valued at 25.5 billion yuan. Just 19 months after leaving NVIDIA, Zhang Jianzhong led his team to deliver Sudi, a domestically made full-function GPU built on the advanced MUSA (MT Unified System Architecture) platform. MUSA is a unified system architecture for full-function GPU computing acceleration that combines GPU hardware and software, covering a unified chip architecture, instruction set, programming model, software runtime libraries and driver framework.

The architecture is “full-featured,” meaning it integrates AI computing acceleration, graphics rendering, physical simulation and scientific computing, as well as ultra-high-definition video encoding and decoding, into a single chip. Based on this architecture, Moore Threads has already launched four generations of GPU chips, covering both enterprise and consumer markets. Its product cycle has been fast, and it also offers matching boards and modules, all-in-one machines, and cluster systems.

Besides Moore Threads, several other domestic GPU makers are also moving through the IPO process. The one closest to Moore Threads is MetaX, which started subscriptions today. It is offering 40.1 million shares this time, equal to 10.02% of its total share capital after the offering. All of the shares are newly issued in a public offering, priced at 104.66 yuan each. In addition, Enflame, Biren Technology in Shanghai, and Shanghai GPU unicorn Vastai Semiconductor have all announced their listing plans.

Domestic chip makers are rushing to go public, and one player has now crossed the finish line.