MetaX Integrated Circuits soared on its trading debut in Shanghai, as investors piled into the second producer of graphics processing units (GPUs) to go public this month amid optimism about China’s push for self-sufficiency in semiconductors and artificial intelligence.
The shares of the Shanghai-based company began trading at 700 yuan on Wednesday on the technology-heavy Star Market, surging 569 per cent from their offer price of 104.66 yuan. The gain extended to 688 per cent to 824.50 yuan at the trading break, making the five-year-old company the third-best trading debut on the mainland’s stock exchanges this year.
The frenzy for MetaX underscores investors’ reaction to China’s ambitions in using domestically made chips to replace imports for powering AI applications and services, even after the US government relaxed some of the export restrictions on Nvidia. Less than two weeks ago, Moore Threads Technology, a local rival of MetaX that has been dubbed “China’s little Nvidia,” soared 425 per cent on its Shanghai trading debut.
“The company is one of the leading manufacturers of high-performance GPU products in China,” said Li Hui, an analyst at Huajin Securities. “It’s expected to fully benefit from the ongoing progress on the domestic substitution.”
MetaX raised 4.2 billion yuan (US$596.3 million) from selling 40.1 million shares in its initial public offer (IPO), ranking it the fifth-largest flotation on the mainland this year, according to Bloomberg data. Moore’s 8 billion yuan IPO was the second largest, behind the 18.2 billion yuan raised by Huadian New Energy Group.
MetaX was founded in 2020 by former three AMD employees, with chairman and general manager Chen Weiliang previously working as a senior director of the US chipmaker. The company said it would use its IPO proceeds to fund research and development on high-performance GPUs. It offers a range of GPUs for AI inference, general-purpose computing and graphics rendering.
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