(Yicai) Jan. 9 -- With MiniMax ringing the opening bell at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange today, five artificial intelligence companies from Shanghai have completed their initial public offerings in one month, setting a new record and sending a clear signal that the metropolis’ AI industry is entering a harvest period.

Biren Technology, MetaX, Insilico Medicine and Iluvatar CoreX, which span fields from graphics processing units to AI-powered drug discovery, have also floated in the last four weeks.

Unlike cities that rely on isolated breakthroughs, Shanghai is building a complete industrial chain from computing power and algorithms to data and embodied AI, said Song Haitao, head of Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s AI Research Institute. Shanghai leads the country in all aspects of AI. The metropolis has a complete industrial chain, from hardware, software, GPUs, algorithms and model training to applications, that no other Chinese city can match, he added.

Shanghai is nurturing AI through an ecosystem built around large language models. As an innovation hub, the municipality has gathered basic research platforms such as the Shanghai AI Laboratory and the Shanghai Center for Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Technology. It is also home to industry innovation centers, AI laboratories and accelerators like the Shanghai Qizhi Institute, the Institute of Artificial Intelligence, China Telecom, the Institute for Advanced Algorithms Research and the Shanghai Academy of AI for Science as well as branches of US tech giant Microsoft and US e-commerce behemoth Amazon. The city has around 250,000 AI professionals, accounting for roughly one third of the national total.

Some 394 AI companies above a designated size in the city, which refers to those with an annual revenue of at least CNY20 million (USD2.8 million), reported a 11.4 percent jump in profit in the first three quarters of 2025 from a year earlier to CNY40.7 billion (USD5.8 billion) and a 39.6 percent surge in operating revenue to CNY435.4 billion (USD62.3 billion), according to data from the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization. The sector is seeing both rapid expansion and improved efficiency. Full-year revenue is expected to soar more than 30 percent to CNY550 billion (USD78.7 billion).

Computing Power

Computing power is the physical backbone of AI. As China’s GPU capital, Shanghai’s “Four Little GPU Tigers” are entering the capital market. MetaX, Biren Technology and Iluvatar CoreX have already listed, and Enflame Technology has completed its IPO tutoring and is preparing to go public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's Nasdaq-style Star Market.

As the first Chinese company to independently develop general-purpose GPUs, Iluvatar CoreX has completed the full journey from core technology breakthroughs to commercial deployment, Yu Xuesong, vice president of the Shanghai-based firm’s department of strategy and public relations, told Yicai.

“Shanghai has a complete industrial chain as well as strong financing and policy support. It provides more than CNY10 million (USD1.4 million) in subsidies a year for chip tape-outs and special projects,” Yu added.

Complete Ecosystem

Behind Shanghai’s GPU success lies an integrated circuit industry that has been built up over decades. Shanghai ranked fourth globally and first in China according to the World Integrated Circuit Association’s latest ranking of the globe’s top 100 cities by overall competitiveness in the semiconductor sector.

Shanghai has established a fully integrated, mutually supportive integrated circuit ecosystem, an official with the SHEITC told Yicai. It has cultivated industry leaders in chip design, manufacturing, packaging and testing, equipment and materials as well as electronic design automation and intellectual property. This includes 35 companies listed on the Star Market, the most of any city nationwide.

Scaling Up

AgiBot’s 5,000th general-purpose embodied robot rolled off the production line on the afternoon of Dec. 8, 2025. The Shanghai-based robotics firm had only produced 1,000 such robots at the start of that year. At the time, it said it planned to build the second stage of its factory in Zhangjiang with an annual capacity of around 10,000 units.

AgiBot was able to scale up production so quickly because most of its upstream suppliers are traditional manufacturers, and the company, which was founded in 2023, is well supported by both upstream and downstream firms, said Vice President Zhu Jie.

“More than half of our supply chain partners are in the Yangtze River Delta region. Shanghai’s ability to radiate across the region allows it to pull these strengths together and support mass production,” Zhu said.

Shanghai is still working to improve embodied AI training infrastructure to develop the country’s first virtual-physical embodied AI training ground at the National and Local Co-Built Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center, the SHEITC told media outlets including Yicai. The municipality will also set up sub-training fields in other parts of the country such as central Henan province and Wuxi in eastern Jiangsu province with unified construction and data collection standards.

Editor: Kim Taylor