1. Shanghai Enflame Technology Co. Ltd., the last of China's five closely watched AI-chip startups to reach the public market, plans to raise 6.12 billion yuan ($911 million) through a Shanghai listing at a valuation of about 61.2 billion yuan. [para. 1]
2. The STAR Market IPO is priced at 142.18 yuan per share, and Enflame will sell more than 43 million shares, or about 10% of its enlarged share capital. [para. 2]
3. Tencent Holdings, already Enflame's largest shareholder and customer, will deepen its ties through the offering. A Tencent unit was allocated about 1.75 million shares in the strategic placement, worth roughly 248 million yuan. Other strategic investors include Tongfu Microelectronics Co., ZTE Corp., Hua Hong Grace Semiconductor Ltd., Xiaomi-related entities and state pension funds. [para. 3][para. 4]
4. The IPO gives Enflame an implied price-to-sales ratio of about 61.8 times based on 2025 revenue of 990 million yuan, below several listed Chinese AI-chip peers. Moore Threads and MetaX, for example, traded at about 167 times and 164 times, respectively, as of Aug. 28. The article's accompanying chart, sourced from the company filing, also illustrates Enflame's rising revenue and narrowing losses from 2023 to 2025. [para. 5]
5. Like most of its peers, Enflame remains unprofitable. Its revenue rose from 301 million yuan in 2023 to 990 million yuan in 2025, while net losses narrowed from 1.7 billion yuan to 1.2 billion yuan over the same period. Enflame said it expects to reach profitability this year or in 2027. [para. 6]
6. Demand for domestically made AI chips has surged as Chinese companies build out computing capacity while access to Nvidia's most advanced processors remains restricted. China's AI-computing demand jumped 417% in the first quarter, while supply grew 128%, according to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. [para. 7]
7. Enflame has benefited from that shift but remains highly concentrated. Tencent accounted for 83.8% of its revenue in 2025, and including related parties, Tencent holds about 20.3% of the company. Management has said more than 80% of revenue comes from inference products, which generally carry lower margins than training chips because customers are sensitive to cost and power efficiency. [para. 8][para. 9]
8. Enflame is also trying to broaden its customer base beyond Tencent. One potential internet customer has placed small trial orders, while another has entered commercial negotiations for mass-production orders. [para. 10]
9. Founded in Shanghai in 2018, Enflame develops AI accelerators using a non-GPU architecture more similar to Google's tensor-processing units and Huawei's Ascend chips than to the general-purpose GPU approach used by Nvidia and several Chinese rivals. Its S60 inference accelerator has shipped at scale, while its newer L600 training-and-inference product has returned from fabrication but has not yet entered large-scale commercial delivery. [para. 11][para. 12]
AI generated, for reference only