China's Ai chip race ignites stock exchanges with new IPOs and investments
From the record debut of Shanghai Biren to the possible debut of Baidu's chip unit, Beijing pushes domestic semiconductors to reduce dependence on the US
The Chinese race for artificial intelligence chips accelerates, driven by capital, record high prices and Beijing's increasingly explicit industrial strategy to reduce its technological dependence on the United States. The latest trades on the Hong Kong and Shanghai markets come as 2026 dawns, and show how AI semiconductors have become one of the hottest topics in global equity, intertwining finance and geopolitics.
We start with the most concredited case: the debut of Shanghai Biren Technology Co. in Hong Kong. The shares of the company, which designs GPUs to train and execute artificial intelligence models, closed the first session with a rise of nearly 76%, after having reached +119% intraday. The IPO, priced at HK$19.60, raised $717 million, with the retail tranche subscribed more than 2,300 times. It was the best debut performance since 2021 among similarly sized listings in the Asian financial centre.
This is a sign of great enthusiasm and great attention towards the sector, which propels China towards an increasingly close competition with the United States for leadership in the sector. Not least because Biren's result is part of a wave of AI-related placements, buoyed by global interest in the sector and Beijing's push to bolster domestic technology. On average, according to Bloomberg, IPOs of this size in Hong Kong between 2020 and 2025 recorded a weighted gain of around 23 per cent on day one. And Biren ranks well above that. On the mainland, performance was even more pronounced: in Shanghai, MetaX Integrated Circuits Shanghai posted a +693% on debut, following that of Moore Threads Technology. Together with Biren, these companies are part of the 'Four Little Dragons' of Chinese GPUs, seen as potential beneficiaries of the space left vacant by Nvidia's downsizing in China due to export restrictions.
Speaking of Biren, we know that it was founded in 2019 by Zhang Wen, former president of SenseTime, and has experienced rapid growth, but in 2023 it was placed on the US list of trade restrictions. Despite this, the company indicated in the prospectus that the proceeds of the IPO will be used for research and development.
The other big news at the beginning of the year, coming from China, concerns Baidu. The search giant - considered for years to be China's Google - is ready to list its AI chip unit. In fact, it has confidentially filed for an IPO of its subsidiary Kunlunxin, which produces data centre accelerators. The company has been valued at least USD 3 billion. Baidu is aiming for a spin-off to enhance the value of the asset and attract investors focused on general purpose chips, in a context of growing technological competition between China and the United States. This news contributed to a very enthusiastic day on the stock market for Baidu, which gained up to 10%.
