Chinese AI chipmaker MetaX's shares skyrocket 755% on debut
MetaX, a Chinese semiconductor startup, saw its shares jump 755% on their first day trading on the Shanghai STAR Market.
The company raised about $586 million (4.2 billion yuan) in its IPO at a price of 104.66 yuan per share on December 17, 2024—making it one of China's best-performing IPOs in recent years.
What does MetaX actually do?
Founded in 2020 by former AMD executives and led by CEO Chen Weiliang, MetaX designs GPUs for artificial intelligence, computing, and graphics.
Their Xiyun C500 chips made up nearly all of their revenue last year.
The company says its latest C588 chip has significantly narrowed the performance gap with NVIDIA's H100 GPU, and mass production of the next-gen C600 is just around the corner.
Why all the hype?
Investor interest was wild: nearly five million people applied for shares, making the retail portion almost 3,000 times oversubscribed—so getting an allotment was like winning a lottery.
After listing, MetaX hit a market cap over 300 billion yuan with a price-to-sales ratio much lower than industry peers—a sign that many see big growth ahead for both MetaX and China's chip sector overall.