Up 22%+ in a single week: Here’s where December’s real opportunities are emerging

By Tracy Qu and Rebecca Feng

AI mania is in full swing in China.

Investors rushed to snap up shares of artificial-intelligence chip maker Moore Threads, betting that Beijing's push to end reliance on foreign technology could help create a homegrown Nvidia.

The company, founded in 2020 by former Nvidia executive Zhang Jianzhong, soared more than fivefold on its market debut Friday, after raising the equivalent of more than $1 billion in a hot initial public offering.

Like Zhang's former employer, Moore Threads designs chips known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, for AI training. It is the first in a quartet of Chinese chip startups, dubbed the "four little dragons," to go public. Revenue more than tripled last year, but the company remained lossmaking.

China and the U.S. are locked in an AI cold war as part of a broader contest for technological dominance. Beijing is pushing to develop a domestic AI ecosystem that doesn't rely on U.S. technology or computing power.

Investors have poured billions into the Chinese tech sector since Chinese startup DeepSeek released a large language model earlier this year to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT, at a fraction of the cost. Since then, tech titans like Alibaba and Tencent have competed to roll out increasingly advanced AI models.

For its part, the U.S. has sought to limit China's access to cutting-edge technology. In October 2023, the Biden administration added Moore Threads to an export blacklist, the Commerce Department's so-called entity list, citing national-security concerns.

"Computing power is state power," Zhang, the company's founder, told a Chinese state-owned newspaper on Friday. He added that AI isn't in a bubble, provided agents don't hit bottlenecks in problem-solving capabilities and large language models continue to evolve.

Analysts say China-made chips — and AI models — lag behind their foreign counterparts in critical aspects. But support from policymakers, and investor enthusiasm for all things AI, offers a strong incentive for firms to keep innovating.

Friday's stock-market frenzy contrasts with rising caution in the U.S., where high valuations and huge spending commitments have led some investors to question if AI-linked stocks are in a bubble and whether lofty share prices are sustainable.

Still, even after Friday's surge, Moore Threads is worth a fraction of Nvidia and other major Western chip makers. It ended the day with a market capitalization of 282.3 billion yuan, equivalent to slightly under $40 billion, according to LSEG data. Nvidia is worth nearly $4.5 trillion.

Moore Threads plans to use the money it raised to fund new AI chip research and development, and to bolster working capital.

It used a recently reopened pathway for unprofitable technology companies in key industries to list on Shanghai's STAR Market. The Nasdaq-like listing venue, also known as the Science and Technology Innovation Board, was set up in 2019 to make it easier for tech companies to raise capital for growth and investment.

The Beijing-based chip designer's stock jumped 425% from its IPO price to close at 600.5 yuan.

There was huge demand for a portion of the stock offering that was reserved for individual investors. Orders from these retail buyers exceeded the shares on offer by about 2,750 times, according to a filing.

The strong debut by Moore Threads bodes well for other deals in China's IPO pipeline, such as MetaX. The Shanghai-based chip company, another of the "four dragons", aims to raise the equivalent of more than $550 million.

Write to Tracy Qu at tracy.qu@wsj.com and Rebecca Feng at rebecca.feng@wsj.com

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Original document: Netflix, Inc. [NFLX] Press release — Dec. 5 2025