(Yicai) Dec. 17 -- Shares of MetaX Integrated Circuits, a Chinese startup in artificial intelligence chips, soared on their first trading day in Shanghai.

MetaX [SHA: 688802] closed 693 percent higher at CNY829.90 (USD117.80) each on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s Nasdaq-style Star Market, after climbing by as much as 755 percent in mid-morning trading.

The Shanghai-based firm issued 40.1 million shares at CNY104.66 (USD14.86) each in an initial public offering that raised about CNY4.2 billion (USD596.2 million). That money will be used to research and develop new high-performance, general-purpose graphic processing units, next-generation AI inference GPUs, and GPU technologies for emerging applications.

Moore Threads, another Chinese GPU maker, went public in Shanghai on Dec. 5, with its stock surging more than fivefold, after an CNY8 billion IPO. As of today, shares [SHA: 688795] of the company often dubbed “China’s Nvidia” have surged 525 percent to CNY714.80 from the issue price of CNY114.28.

Founded in 2020, MetaX is not yet profitable. Its net loss narrowed 56 percent to CNY345.5 million (USD49 million) in the first three quarters from a year earlier on a 454 percent surge in revenue to CNY1.2 billion.

MetaX believes it has not yet turned profitable because of the long-term dominance of foreign giants in the global GPU market, particularly Nvidia which has a more than 80 percent share. Chinese companies started later and are still in the early stages of technological breakthroughs and product implementation, which require substantial R&D and market expansion investment.

Driven by China-US tech rivalry and domestic substitution policies, the take-up rate for Chinese chips has climbed in recent years, resulting in the emergence of several competitive GPU makers. However, the Chinese industry as a whole is still in its early stages of development, and a clear competitive landscape has yet to take shape, MetaX said.

Editor: Futura Costaglione