(Yicai) June 25 -- The initial public offerings of two leading Chinese developers of artificial intelligence chips have moved a step closer amid soaring demand for AI graphics processing units and the need for capital to fund further research and development.

MetaX Integrated Circuits has finished its IPO guidance process, which began last November, while Moore Threads -- having launched its preparations in January -- has now entered the guidance acceptance phase, according to the China Securities Regulatory Commission.

Chinese chipmakers are eyeing stock market listings because their R&D requires a lot of money, an industry analyst told Yicai. With demand for AI chips increasing, "companies need to tell their stories in the capital market," the person noted.

Clients would quiz Chinese chipmakers on performance gaps with Nvidia and ecosystem compatibility, but as US export curbs have increasingly restricted the availability of the California-based company’s products in China, such questions are no longer important, the analyst pointed out.

While sales of China-made computing power cards lagged last year, the rollout of DeepSeek-backed applications exhausted the backlog purchased by domestic internet firms and telecom operators in the first quarter of this year, according to Zhou Zhengang, vice president of International Data Corporation China.

Since the release of DeepSeek’s ChatGPT-like R1 large language model in January -- an event which Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen called an “AI Sputnik moment” -- Chinese companies have been rapidly embracing AI

Although many of this year’s DeepSeek-backed all-in-one applications still rely on Nvidia GPUs, some of the most in-demand models are now powered by domestic chips, Zhou told Yicai.

Around 35 percent of China's data center accelerator card market used domestic computing power last year, according to IDC data. The figure may exceed 40 percent in the first half of this year and may pass 50 percent in the future, highlighting that domestic computing power will become the mainstream of supply.

The use of domestic chips will continue to expand because of the increasing restrictions on Nvidia exports to China, Yang Jian, chief technology officer of MetaX, said in an interview with Yicai earlier this year.

Some AI pre-training is expected to switch to non-Nvidia cards by the end of this year, while inference and training use cases for Chinese AI chips will steadily grow, Yang added.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev