Moore Threads Secures Shanghai IPO Approval, Aims to Challenge Nvidia's Dominance

TradingKey - On September 26th, Chinese AI chip company Moore Threads secured approval from the Shanghai Stock Exchange's listing review committee for its IPO. As the only domestic enterprise to achieve mass production of fully functional GPUs, Moore Threads is often referred to as the "Chinese Nvidia." 

The company aims to raise 8 billion yuan from this IPO, with the funds primarily allocated for the development of next-generation AI training and inference chips, graphics chips, and AI SoC chips.

Founded in 2020, Moore Threads has not yet turned a profit but has experienced significant revenue growth. In the first half of 2025, its revenue hit 702 million yuan, surpassing the total of the previous three years combined, with a compound annual growth rate of over 208% in the past three years. Its gross profit margin improved dramatically from -70.08% in 2022 to 70.71% by 2024. The company anticipates achieving consolidated profitability by as early as 2027.

Shen Meng, a director at Beijing investment bank Chanson & Co., expressed that investor enthusiasm for the IPO is expected to be high, given the current investment interest in artificial intelligence. Moore Threads garners additional attention as it is viewed as China's answer to Nvidia.

The company's founder, Zhang Jianzhong, previously worked at Nvidia. In 2020, amid new U.S. export restrictions on chips, Zhang left to establish Moore Threads, aiming to "develop a fully functional GPU." 

Unlike the market's mainstream focus on AI computation-oriented GPGPU or ASIC chips, Moore Threads aims to create a "fully functional GPU" that integrates core capabilities like AI computation acceleration, graphics rendering, physical simulation and scientific calculations, and ultra-high-definition video encoding and decoding on a single chip.

Currently, products like Moore Threads' MTT S80 and S5000 match or even exceed international standards in certain metrics, with some performance benchmarks approaching those of Nvidia's RTX 3060. Moore Threads is also the first domestic company to mass-produce DirectX 12 graphics accelerators, ensuring broad compatibility with mainstream development toolchains, thus reducing user migration and development costs.

In its filings, Moore Threads acknowledged that, compared to global giants like Nvidia, there remains a gap in research and core technology. However, the company emphasized its commitment to increasing investment in innovative project development to become a globally competitive GPU leader.

Amid the U.S. restrictions on chip exports to China and rising geopolitical tensions, China is accelerating its push towards self-sufficiency in the semiconductor and AI sectors. In addition to Moore Threads, other chip companies are also preparing for IPOs. MetaX, an AI GPU startup founded in 2020 by former AMD employees, applied for a listing on the STAR Market by the end of June. Biren Technology, a GPU design company, is preparing to apply for a Hong Kong listing in Q3.