A 179% first day
Shanghai Enflame Technology closed its first day on Shanghai’s STAR Market on Friday at 397 yuan, 179% above its offer price of 142.18 yuan, the South China Morning Post reported. The Tencent-backed AI chipmaker raised 6.12 billion yuan (about $911 million) by selling roughly 43 million new shares.
The stock opened at 410 yuan and rose as high as 475 yuan, a 234% intraday gain, before giving part of it back. Reports during the session put the rise at around 200% and the valuation at roughly 185 billion yuan while the shares traded near 430 yuan, according to Investing.com. The closing numbers are lower: Enflame ended the day worth 170.9 billion yuan ($25.5 billion), against about 61 billion yuan at the offer price.
Demand far beyond the float
Retail investors bid for 4,073 times the shares set aside for them, according to Enflame’s filing to the exchange, The Next Web reported; CNBC put the figure above 6,000 times. SCMP said about 7 million investors placed orders and that the allocation rate was 0.025%.
Supply explains part of the move. Only 17.9 million shares, 4.16% of the company’s 430.35 million total, could be traded on the first day, ts2.tech calculated from the listing announcement. The rest were strategic allocations or locked up.
One shareholder, one customer
Tencent is Enflame’s largest shareholder, with 17.95% after the offering, and also its largest customer. Direct sales to Tencent Technology (Shenzhen), together with sales through an affiliated purchasing arrangement, accounted for 83.79% of Enflame’s 2025 revenue, according to the prospectus as summarised by ts2.tech. The Next Web reported that Tencent’s share was about 38% a year earlier.
That concentration is the central risk in the listing. Enflame’s revenue rose to 990 million yuan in 2025 from 722 million yuan in 2024, while its net loss narrowed to 1.16 billion yuan from 1.5 billion. Before the debut, GuruFocus calculated that the offer price valued Enflame at 61.8 times 2025 sales, against roughly 160 times for rivals Moore Threads and MetaX. At Friday’s closing value, the multiple is above 170.
A domestic customer with deep pockets is an asset while US export restrictions limit Chinese buyers’ access to advanced foreign chips. It also means Enflame’s growth depends on how much Tencent chooses to spend, and on whether the company can win other large buyers.
The last of the four little dragons
SCMP described Enflame as the last of China’s “four little dragons” of AI chips to list, after Moore Threads, MetaX and Biren Technology, as Beijing pushes for semiconductor self-sufficiency. Its peers set a high bar. MetaX rose nearly 700% on its first day in December and Moore Threads 425% the same month, while Biren gained 76% in January, according to The Next Web. Enflame’s 179% sits between them.
Enflame was founded in Shanghai in 2018 by Zhao Lidong and Zhang Yalin, both formerly at AMD, and has fewer than 900 employees. The listing lifted each founder’s fortune to about $2.5 billion, The Next Web reported. The company says the proceeds will go into next-generation AI processors and large-scale computing systems.
What to watch
Two things. The float will widen as locked shares become tradable, which removes the scarcity that helped Friday’s move. And Enflame’s first results as a listed company will show whether Tencent’s share of revenue starts to fall, which is the clearest measure of whether it can sell beyond its biggest backer.
