Shanghai Enflame has cleared the listing committee for a 6 billion yuan float on the STAR board. It is the fourth and final member of China's elite AI-chip startup cohort to reach the market, and the one most tied to a single customer.
The Enflame IPO is on. Shanghai Enflame Technology, an AI-chip startup backed by Tencent, has won listing-committee approval to raise about 6 billion yuan ($888m) on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR board, according to Bloomberg. It is the last of China’s “four little dragons,” the cohort of homegrown AI chipmakers Beijing is counting on to break its reliance on Nvidia.
Enflame plans to sell 10 to 15 per cent of its shares and pour the proceeds into its next two generations of AI cloud chips and the software around them. Founded in Shanghai in 2018 by ex-AMD engineer Zhao Lidong, the company was last valued at about $2.8bn before the listing, per the Hurun index.
Enflame’s biggest strength is also its biggest risk: Tencent. The tech giant owns roughly 20 per cent of the company and, by Bloomberg’s account, bought about 84 per cent of its revenue in 2025, up from around 38 per cent a year earlier. Tencent is backer and buyer at once.
That has upsides. Tencent pre-funds Enflame’s roadmap with orders, which is how a startup with barely 1 per cent of China’s market ships advanced silicon at all. The company says Tencent’s demand has “far exceeded” what it can supply.
But a chipmaker that leans on one client for most of its sales is exposed if that client’s priorities shift, and the relationship already squeezes Enflame’s prices. It is also deep in the red: cumulative losses run to about 4.29 billion yuan (roughly $600m) over three years, though the annual loss is narrowing.
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Investors are buying the bigger story. With US export controls choking off Nvidia’s best chips, Beijing wants domestic substitutes, and last year it loosened STAR-board rules to let loss-making hardware firms list. The result is a wave of AI-chip floats riding the same logic as China’s $295bn plan to build data centres that lock Nvidia out .
Enflame’s three fellow “dragons”, Moore Threads, Biren, and MetaX, have all already listed on the STAR board and trade well above their offer prices, with Moore Threads up 425 per cent on its December debut. That receptive backdrop is part of why Enflame can raise nearly $900m while still losing money.
The same drive is pushing buyers like ByteDance toward domestic chips , and inventing workarounds such as photonic computing .
Enflame has real products, not slideware: its latest chip packs 144GB of on-chip memory, and an earlier model shipped tens of thousands of units. But it still trails Huawei and a now-profitable Cambricon at home, even as it relies on a single anchor client and Nvidia chips that keep finding side doors back into China .
So the float is a referendum. Its pricing and demand will show how much conviction Chinese institutions really have in the country’s AI-chip-independence story, and whether that conviction survives a hard look at a balance sheet carrying $600m in losses and a customer list of essentially one.
China needs a credible public champion for its chip ambitions. Enflame is one of the strongest candidates, and the most dependent.
Cristian Dina is the CRO at The Next Web. He has interviewed 300+ industry leaders and authored the book King of Networking, establishing hi (show all) Cristian Dina is the CRO at The Next Web. He has interviewed 300+ industry leaders and authored the book King of Networking, establishing himself as one of the most connected and respected voices in the ecosystem. At just 23 years old, Cristian was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 2025 list, representing a new generation of tech builders, bold thinkers who move fast, build with purpose, and create real impact.