A 188.37% first-day pop handed Enflame Technology a 176.4 billion yuan (US$26.3 billion) market value on Friday, as Shanghai traders priced the Tencent-backed chip designer as the next winner in China's campaign to displace Nvidia accelerators. The stock opened at 410 yuan against a 142.18 yuan issue price and finished the session up 206%.
The debut premium is the market's latest estimate of how much of Nvidia's China business domestic vendors can take. International chipmakers led by Nvidia accounted for nearly 60% of China's AI accelerator market in 2025, according to IDC data cited in Enflame's prospectus. US export controls have closed off Nvidia's data-centre compute sales into China, and Beijing has shown little appetite for importing advanced chips while it pursues self-sufficiency.
"Enflame's listing completes the set of investable domestic GPU names, and the scarcity premium is doing most of the work here," said Rachel Kim, semiconductor analyst at Edgen. "The question investors have not answered is whether 176 billion yuan of market value can be supported by a company that booked 990 million yuan of revenue last year."
That revenue figure, disclosed in the prospectus, compares with 722 million yuan in 2024 and 301 million yuan in 2023. Enflame remains unprofitable, with cumulative net losses exceeding 4.2 billion yuan across 2023 to 2025. It projects revenue of 2.3 billion to 3 billion yuan for the first three quarters of 2026, growth of 325.78% to 455.36% year on year, and a net loss attributable to shareholders of 700 million to 860 million yuan, narrowing by 3.13% to 21.15%.
The IPO raised 6.119 billion yuan by selling 43.035 million shares, making it one of the largest mainland tech listings this year and the third-highest-priced STAR Market debut behind Pinpoint Laser and Unitree Technology. Retail demand was extreme: the online tranche drew orders for more than 6,000 times the shares available, prompting Enflame to reallocate additional stock to individual investors. About 7 million online investors submitted orders for 42.1 billion shares, and the final allocation rate was 0.02455315%, one of the lowest on the mainland this year. Winning one lot of 500 shares produced a paper gain of about 133,900 yuan.
Four little dragons, four different debuts
Enflame is the last of China's "four little dragons" of AI chips to list, and the peer record explains part of the demand. MetaX surged nearly 700% on its first trading day in December 2025. Moore Threads gained 425.46% on debut. Biren Technology, which chose Hong Kong rather than Shanghai, rose 76% in January. All three have continued to trade above their issue prices, though MetaX fell 5.17% and Biren dropped 8.22% in the most recent session, a reminder that debut premiums do not move in one direction.
Enflame's opening gain was smaller than MetaX's or Moore Threads' in percentage terms, but the comparison is distorted by scale. Enflame priced at 142.18 yuan a share and carried a pre-trading valuation of about 61 billion yuan, both far above its peers at listing. The company also has a thin free float: only 17.9 million unrestricted shares, or 4.1595% of post-issuance capital, with strategic placement taking 8.607 million shares, or 20% of the offering. That scarcity cuts both ways for anyone trading the stock.
Proceeds are earmarked for fifth- and sixth-generation AI chip development and an AI software-hardware collaborative innovation project. Enflame, founded in 2018, has not disclosed the process node, memory bandwidth or power specifications of those generations, so its performance claims against Nvidia's current data-centre products remain unverified by independent benchmarks. Because it is unprofitable, the stock sits in the STAR Market's Growth Tier from day one, under special regulatory arrangements for loss-making issuers.
The demand side is already running on domestic silicon
The bull case rests less on Enflame's own roadmap than on evidence that Chinese models are being trained and served on Chinese chips. Z.AI said its GLM-5.3-Flash model runs entirely on China-made chips; analysts said the company likely used a combination of Huawei accelerators and chips from Enflame and other local suppliers. Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 has narrowed the gap with leading US models, and adoption of Chinese AI systems is rising outside China. Alibaba is developing its own AI chips and supporting software while optimising systems for major domestic models.
Capital spending is following. Goldman Sachs said in an August report that growth in China's foundation models and AI applications is driving development across AI chips, foundries, memory and advanced packaging, with analysts expecting China's semiconductor capital expenditure to reach US$82 billion by 2030, led by memory and advanced-node capacity expansion. That figure is the sector's anchor: it implies a domestic equipment and design market several times Enflame's current revenue base, and it is the number that justifies paying a premium for any listed exposure to it.
The near-term risk is mechanical rather than fundamental. A 0.025% allocation rate means almost all of Friday's buying came from investors who did not get stock in the IPO, and a 4.16% free float means small sell orders move the price. CXMT's July debut, which surged nearly 466% and made it the most valuable China-listed company, shows how far these moves can run; it also shows how much of the return is captured on day one rather than held. Enflame's next hard datapoint is its first post-listing quarterly report, which will test whether the 325% to 455% revenue growth it has guided to actually lands.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
