A logo of Moore Threads at the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 28, 2025 Photo: VCG

China's leading artificial intelligence (AI) chipmaker Moore Threads Technology Co surged 425 percent to reach 600.5 yuan ($84.85) per share on its first trading day on the STAR board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Friday. Industry analysts said the surge in the company's shares highlights the huge market potential for domestic replacements of Western-made graphics processing units (GPUs) amid the booming growth of the AI industry.

As the first full-function GPU enterprise to be listed in China, the Beijing-based company raised about 8 billion yuan in the IPO, and the proceeds will be used for next-generation projects in areas like AI and graphics chips, and to supplement working capital, according to an IPO prospectus submitted to the exchange.

Notably, the company's IPO ignited an investor frenzy on the A-share market, with its shares being oversubscribed by retail investorsmore than 4,000 times - a testament to the red-hot demand.

"Investor frenzy over Moore Threads reflects broad expectations for the prospects of China's AI chip industry, and the market potential is huge thanks to supportive national policies," Ma Jihua, a veteran telecom industry analyst, told the Global Times on Friday.

China has been gradually closing the gap in GPU production compared with the world's most advanced semiconductor process technology providers, while Moore Threads is one of the representative companies making contributions to the GPU field in the country, Ma said.

The IPO is a key milestone in the company's development, as it's a recognition of the company's long-term commitment to independent innovation of core technologies and accelerating product iterations, and also marks the company's systemic capability for synergistic development from technology, products to market and capital in the strategic field of GPU computing power, according to its official WeChat account.

For China's pursuit of independently developing high-end GPUs, it is also a symbolic new starting point, the company added.

Moore Threads was established in 2020 with Universal GPUs at its core. The company focuses on developping Universal GPU chips and related products, and supports a range of workloads such as AI computing acceleration, 3D graphics rendering, UHD video encoding and decoding, physical simulation, and scientific computing, according to the company's website.

Over the past five years, the company has successfully mass-produced five chips, and developed four generations of GPU architectures and intelligent SoC products. It has achieved a diversified layout ranging from chips and computing cards to intelligent computing clusters, formed a complete product matrix for computing acceleration, and comprehensively supports all scenarios of the "cloud-edge-end," according to a report of Securities Times on Friday.

"Growing capital inflows into companies like Moore Threads will help them gain momentum in multiple aspects including research and development capabilities and market influences, and eventually, this will be transformed into industrial capacity and innovative products," Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Beijing-based Information Consumption Alliance, told the Global Times on Friday.

Xiang said the Moore Threads' listing is expected to accelerate listing plans for other domestic GPU developers, such as MetaX and Biren Technology.

Looking ahead, Moore Threads said that it will continue to focus on independent innovation, deepen efforts in the frontier fields of high-performance GPUs and intelligent computing clusters, drive the computing industry to continuously evolve toward a more universal and intelligent direction, and contribute solid and far-reaching long-term support to the mission of the era - namely, the vigorous development of the national digital economy and scientific and technological self-reliance.