Enflame Technology (燧原科技) listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market on Friday, September 11 – the last of China’s four big domestic AI chipmakers to reach the public markets. The IPO priced at 142.18 yuan per share. The stock opened at 410 yuan, up 188%, peaked at 475 yuan during the session, and closed at 397 yuan, giving the company a market capitalisation of 170.9 billion yuan, or roughly 25.5 billion dollars at 6.71 yuan to the dollar.
For scale: Enflame booked 990 million yuan of revenue in all of 2025. The closing valuation is 172 times that number. Even against management’s bullish 2026 guidance of 2.3 to 3.0 billion yuan, the price-to-sales multiple sits near 57. Nobody bought this stock on Friday because of the financials.
Why the first session went vertical
Three things did the work. First, an almost non-existent float. Only 17.9 million shares – 4.16% of the share capital – were actually tradable on day one. The rest is locked up with existing holders for 36 months. Turnover hit 76% of the available stock, which tells you how unstable that price was.
Second, demand. The retail tranche was oversubscribed more than 6,100 times, leaving an allotment rate of 0.0246%. Anyone who won a single lot of 500 shares was sitting on about 134,000 yuan of paper profit at the open, close to 20,000 dollars.
Third, the label. Enflame belongs to the group Chinese media calls the four dragons of domestic GPU and accelerator design, alongside Moore Threads, MetaX and Biren. It was founded in March 2018 by two former AMD people, Zhao Lidong and Zhang Yalin, and went through ten funding rounds before the IPO, raising more than 9 billion yuan in total.
Tencent is the biggest shareholder and the biggest customer
This is the single most important fact about Enflame. In 2025, direct sales to Tencent plus revenue booked through the AVAP model came to 830 million yuan – 83.79% of total revenue. Three years earlier that share was 33.34%. Tencent holds 17.95% of the company, or 20.26% together with parties acting in concert, making it the largest outside shareholder. The relationship dates back to 2019, and per the prospectus, orders from Tencent are covered by a contract running through 2027.
That is both the moat and the ceiling. Tencent brings guaranteed volume and absorbs a five-to-six month validation cycle that would sink a smaller supplier. It also means that if Tencent cuts orders or pushes for lower prices, Enflame’s numbers fall off a cliff – a risk the company spells out in its own filings. Heavy customer concentration is a sector-wide condition rather than an Enflame quirk: the top five customers accounted for 88.66% of Cambricon’s 2025 revenue, 96.89% for Enflame, and 98.29% for Moore Threads in the first half of 2025.
Revenue compounds, losses keep running
The trajectory is that of a company in a violent growth phase. Revenue went from 301 million yuan in 2023 to 722 million in 2024 to 990 million in 2025. The first half of 2026 alone brought 1.12 billion yuan, up 279% year on year, and management guides to 2.3-3.0 billion for the full year, an increase of 325% to 455%.
The red ink is just as consistent: 1.67 billion yuan of net loss in 2023, 1.51 billion in 2024 and 1.16 billion in 2025, a three-year total of 4.34 billion yuan. Management says the company can reach consolidated break-even in 2026 assuming revenue lands and gross margins hold, but does not rule out 2027. The 6.12 billion yuan raised in the IPO is earmarked mainly for the fifth and sixth generations of its chips.
Four dragons, four different stories
Enflame is the last of the four to list, and it arrives against a rather loud backdrop. Moore Threads closed its first day up 425%. MetaX set a STAR Market debut record at 692.95%. Biren chose Hong Kong. All four were handed capital they would not have raised on financial merit alone, because none of them is profitable today.
But the market has started to compare rather than merely to cheer. In the first half of 2026, Cambricon posted 5.996 billion yuan of revenue and 2.311 billion yuan of net profit. Moore Threads delivered 1.736 billion yuan of revenue at a 56.95% gross margin. MetaX reported 612 million yuan of profit, though strip out one-off items and it is still slightly underwater. Enflame has the fastest growth rate and the most concentrated customer base.
The euphoria is already cooling. Moore Threads hit limit-down on September 7 and touched a new low of 364 yuan on September 10. MetaX has retreated from its own peak. A stock that turns over 76% of its float on day one tends to look like that a few weeks later.
What actually matters here
Behind all the noise sits one simple force: US export controls on advanced Nvidia parts. Chinese data centre operators have no choice but to buy domestic silicon, even when it trails the flagship by a generation. China’s AI chip market passed 100 billion yuan in 2025 and is growing better than 40% a year, and only a handful of companies can serve it.
So the market is not paying for results. It is paying for a seat at the table. The open question is whether Enflame can convert Tencent’s endorsement into customers outside Shenzhen. Without that, a 25 billion dollar valuation will be hard to defend once the excitement fades. For engineers in Europe and elsewhere this is worth filing away too: the list of serious alternatives to Nvidia for accelerator capacity is getting longer, and those vendors will be hunting for customers well beyond China. Worth noting as well that Enflame’s architecture is domain-specific rather than a general purpose GPU, tuned above all for inference – the training gap against Nvidia is still there.
We covered the wider thread in our piece on DeepSeek ordering 160,000 Huawei Ascend chips.
This content was generated using artificial intelligence and reviewed by a human editor.
This article is also available in Polish (PL).
Sources
- Blue Whale Finance / East Money: 燧原科技上市首日暴涨1.8倍 (11.09.2026)
- Huxiu / Read AI Time: 燧原科技科创板上市：发行估值612亿元，腾讯贡献超八成收入 (10.09.2026)
- BT财经: 连亏三年仍估值1700亿：燧原科技首日暴涨188%靠什么撑 (11.09.2026)
- Sina Finance: 燧原科技上市首日大涨超188% (11.09.2026)
- Tencent News: 燧原科技上市首日市值破千亿元，上海国资陪跑八年 (11.09.2026)
- Zhihu discussion thread on Enflame’s valuation and DSA architecture: link
- China AI Weekly Brief (tech.163.com, arXiv, HuggingFace), 13.09.2026
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