When Moore Threads made its debut on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, it became immediately clear that investors were no longer pricing the company by its current fundamentals. They were pricing the idea of China’s technological self-sufficiency. The stock of the Beijing-based GPU developer soared more than 400% on opening day – a moment that we at NewsTrackerToday interpret as a turning point in China’s push to build its own ecosystem of AI accelerators and reduce its dependence on Nvidia.
The company raised roughly $1.1 billion, and its shares closed at 600.5 yuan, far above the IPO price of 114.28 yuan. For a business that has yet to turn a profit, this valuation would once have sounded implausible. But as geopolitical analyst Daniel Wu points out, the logic behind such explosive multiples lies in the broader context: “Every new U.S. export restriction amplifies the strategic value of domestic alternatives. Moore Threads is no longer just a private company – it has become a symbolic cornerstone of China’s AI ambitions.”
In its prospectus, the company stated that IPO proceeds will support next-generation GPU development for both AI training and inference, alongside strengthening working capital. The message is clear: Moore Threads aims to position itself at the center of China’s emerging AI-compute architecture. With the country’s demand for accelerators growing faster than supply, even products that lag behind Nvidia’s top-tier chips in raw performance are attracting significant investor interest. Inside China, we at NewsTrackerToday see a shift toward valuing continuity, independence and scalability over global benchmark leadership.
The timing makes the success even more striking. In 2023, Moore Threads was added to the U.S. Entity List, cutting it off from advanced lithography and forcing the company to rely on older, less efficient domestic manufacturing nodes. That inevitably impacts performance and energy consumption. Yet, as technology-sector analyst Sophie Leclerc notes, these constraints do not diminish the company’s relevance within China: “The competitive advantage in this environment is not having the world’s fastest GPU – it’s having a GPU you can build, modify and iterate without foreign permission.”
Moore Threads now forms part of a broader wave of Chinese chip developers attempting to fill the vacuum left by Nvidia’s restricted presence. Huawei is accelerating its Ascend lineup; Cambricon has more than doubled in value this year; Enflame and Biren continue securing substantial capital. Regulators are meanwhile approving semiconductor IPOs at a rapid pace to build out a domestic supply chain resilient to geopolitical turbulence. At NewsTrackerToday, we observe that this dynamic often results in overheated listings – yet it also injects unprecedented momentum into China’s AI hardware sector.
Still, the excitement does not erase the structural risks. Moore Threads remains unprofitable, faces limits on advanced fabrication and operates in an increasingly competitive domestic landscape. A 400% rally reflects a geopolitical thesis rather than proven technological leadership. The central challenge now is whether the company can sustain innovation without access to cutting-edge manufacturing capabilities – a bottleneck that has historically slowed many Chinese semiconductor ventures.
In our assessment at News Tracker Today, the Moore Threads IPO is not an endpoint but the opening chapter of a longer story: China is actively constructing its own AI-compute ecosystem, and capital will continue flowing into any firm capable of offering a credible alternative to Nvidia. For investors, the key variables are technological velocity – chip efficiency, architecture maturity, release cadence and the depth of the customer base. If Moore Threads delivers meaningful progress, it could become a foundational pillar of China’s AI infrastructure. If not, the spectacular debut may be remembered as a brief moment of market euphoria fueled by policy momentum rather than sustainable innovation.
