Beijing’s quest for technological self-sufficiency has a new king: Moore Threads, the chip designer, has staged a historic stock market debut in Shanghai. Its shares soared more than 500% on its first day of trading. The euphoria has validated the strategy of a giant which, despite being on the US blacklist, has become one of the great hopes for breaking the semiconductor blockade. And in this maneuver, the great beneficiary has been the founder of DeepSeek.
A debut and million-dollar profits. The IPO has not followed the usual channels. The China Securities Regulatory Commission gave the green light to the operation in just four months, a record time compared to the usual 470 days on average, something that underlines the state’s urgency to capitalize on the sector. According to SCMPLiang Wenfeng – through his fund – acquired more than 82,000 shares before the premiere.
The result: a profit of almost $5.6 million in 48 hours. Nikkei Asia confirms that the company has reached a capitalization of 305 billion yuan (about $42 billion), becoming the fourth most valuable company on the STAR market. And it is not yet profitable: it hopes to be profitable in 2027.
The pedigree of the alternative. The market is not buying just anything, it is buying the Chinese alternative to NVIDIA. Moore Threads is not just another startup; was founded in 2020 by Zhang Jianzhong, who was general manager of NVIDIA in China. In fact, this insider knowledge is what led the US to consider it a direct threat and include it on its blacklist in 2023.
Its GPUs, such as the MTT S4000, are the spearhead of an industry that seeks to replace the H100 and H200—the latter yes it will arrive in China directly— Americans in state data centers, where the government already requires a 50% share of local chips for these crucial teams.
It’s not just chips, it’s software. What makes Moore Threads dangerous to Jensen Huang’s business is not just the silicon, but its attack on an important technology for NVIDIA: CUDA. The Chinese startup has developed MUSA, a platform that allows you to recycle code written for NVIDIA and run it on your own GPUs.
It is something that eliminates the main barrier to entry for Chinese companies that wanted to migrate but were trapped in the American software ecosystem. And it is also the missing piece in the puzzle of the historic alliance of Chinese companies forged to overthrow NVIDIA.
The circle closes. The DeepSeek creator’s investment in Moore Threads is not reduced to financial terms. DeepSeek, which already hinted in August that I would no longer need NVIDIA chipsis collaborating closely with the chipmaker to optimize its AI models on domestic hardware.
With an alternative to NVIDIA that triples its value and an AI capable of competing with Gemini and ChatGPT, China is building a closed ecosystem where hardware and software feed each other. It is a symbiosis that, in addition to uniting, shields. To the Chinese industry against any future sanctions from Washington.
Cover image | Composition with images of Moore Threads and Matheus Bertelli for Pexels
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