Moore Threads’ blockbuster Shanghai debut has ignited talk of a credible Chinese challenger to Nvidia.
The Beijing-based chipmaker has raised roughly ¥8 billion ($1.1 billion) with shares soaring more than 500% on the first day.
The massive rally displays that the investors have high confidence about China bridging the technology gap faster than skeptics expect.
Yet beneath the headline-grabbing gains lies a harder truth: transforming IPO hype into a sustained competitive threat requires clearing enormous technical and operational hurdles.
The market euphoria: Capital flows, but will products follow?
Moore Threads’ IPO was oversubscribed by over 4,000x as it opened for trading at 650 yuan per share, against an IPO price of 114.28 yuan.
The IPO marks the biggest first-day pop for a $1 billion-plus offering in mainland China since 2019 regulatory reforms.
The sheer scale of success indicates that Chinese investors are rotating money into domestic semiconductor plays with gusto, betting on Beijing’s push for tech self-sufficiency.
The development is expected to open a lasting market for homegrown alternatives now that US export curbs have starved Nvidia’s China operations.
Sinolink Securities initiated coverage with a “buy” rating and set a target price of 182.25 yuan, citing strong GPU demand as the AI era drives rapid expansion.
The firm expects Moore Threads’ revenue to jump as much as 242 percent in 2025 to 1.5 billion yuan.
Yet the real test isn’t raising capital, it’s converting that firepower into products that customers actually adopt.
From 2022 to 2024, Moore Threads burned through 4.6 billion yuan in cumulative losses on 3.8 billion yuan in R&D spending.
The company’s net loss narrowed to 724 million yuan in the first three quarters of 2025, down 19 percent from a year earlier, but profitability remains elusive. Management expects to reach consolidated black ink as early as 2027.
The Nvidia gap: Can Moore Threads close it before competition intensifies?
The blockbuster IPO comes amid Nvidia’s reign in the global technology and evolving artificial intelligence space.
Moore Threads’ flagship S4000 GPU delivers roughly 25 TFLOPS of FP32 performance, a solid improvement over earlier generations but only about one-third the raw compute of Nvidia’s current H100 accelerator.
Compared to Nvidia’s 2020-era A100, the S4000 edges ahead on raw single-precision compute but lacks the ecosystem maturity and proven track record that keep Nvidia entrenched in enterprise data centers.
The company is betting its MUSIFY tool, which aims to port CUDA code to Moore Threads’ proprietary MUSA architecture, will smooth adoption, but that software bridge remains unproven at scale.
As per a Wccftech analysis:
Chinese GPU firms like Moore Threads still need a lot of work to meet the R&D standards of Nvidia and AMD.
Manufacturing capacity poses an even sharper constraint. Moore Threads relies on SMIC, China’s most advanced domestic foundry, which produces chips using 7-nanometer process technology, multiple generations behind TSMC.
SMIC’s own yields on advanced AI chips hover around 20 percent, meaning four of every five silicon dies end up as scrap, a stark contrast to TSMC’s 60-plus percent on its latest processes.
That yield gap translates directly into higher costs, constrained supply, and slower time-to-market when customers are impatient for capacity.
Moore Threads’ IPO marks a genuine shift in investor appetite and Beijing’s strategic push for chip autonomy.
But transforming debut euphoria into a durable competitive advantage demands years of technical breakthroughs, reliable customer wins, and manufacturing scale that the company has yet to demonstrate.
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