The rapid surge of AI large models has fundamentally altered the development logic of numerous industries.
Optical chips are a prime example of this transformation. Recently, NVIDIA invested heavily, announcing capital injections of $2 billion each into photonics giants Lumentum and Coherent, while securing billions of dollars in long-term procurement commitments and future capacity rights.
Driven by these industry giants, capital market enthusiasm for optical technology has reached a fever pitch. For instance, despite Yuanjie Semiconductor's revenue being only around 600 million yuan in 2025, it has strongly joined the &#34;thousand-yuan stock&#34; club, with its price-to-earnings (TTM) ratio reaching a staggering 473 times as of April 2.
It is amidst this boiling industry trend that domestic optical chip unicorns have begun their sprint toward the capital markets.
Recently, Shanghai Lightintelligence Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as &#34;Lightintelligence&#34;) submitted its prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Lightintelligence primarily provides optical interconnect and optical computing solutions.
As an independent Scale-up optical interconnect solution provider in China, Lightintelligence ranks first in the domestic market by 2025 revenue, capturing an overwhelming 88.3% market share. It is backed by a lineup of star investment institutions, including Tencent and Baidu.
With this IPO, Lightintelligence plans to raise funds to continuously expand its optical interconnect hardware and solutions and to increase investment in cutting-edge fields such as optical computing products.
However, stripping away the dazzling halo of giant endorsements and &#34;No. 1 market share,&#34; Lightintelligence's performance scale remains relatively limited. Its total revenue for 2025 was only 106 million yuan, while its net loss for the same period reached as high as 1.342 billion yuan.
Furthermore, nearly 80% of this revenue is derived from its top five customers.
As the light of computing power shines into reality, Lightintelligence's commercialization test has only just begun.
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<h2>Accumulation and Industry Explosion</h2>
For years, the spotlight of the computing world has remained fixed on microelectronic chips.
Microelectronic chips use electrical signals as information carriers for signal transmission. However, as chip fabrication processes continue to shrink, issues such as heat generation and power consumption have become bottlenecks restricting their development.
In contrast, optical chips use higher-frequency light waves as information carriers for optoelectronic signal conversion. Their advantages, such as lower transmission loss and shorter latency, have prompted the market to turn its attention toward this field.
However, the application scenarios for optical chips were once concentrated in limited markets such as VCSEL for consumer electronics sensing and EML for communications.
At that time, investment institutions also held some reservations regarding optical chips.
&#34;Looking globally, there are currently no giants in the optical chip sector comparable to those in integrated circuits. The leading company, Lumentum, had revenue of only about $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2019. For startups, it is extremely difficult to span the three major fields of high power, communications, and sensing like Lumentum, which itself gradually achieved this through long-term mergers and acquisitions. This is the dilemma of optical chip investment: extremely high technical barriers and relatively limited individual market spaces,&#34; Fang Hong, a partner at Delian Capital, stated publicly in 2020.
But the advent of AI has changed the development trajectory of the optical chip industry chain.
The exponential demand for global computing power from AI large models has amplified the shortcomings of traditional electrical chips—namely power consumption and latency—when processing large-scale parallel computing. This has created an opportunity for the optical chip industry chain.
Against this backdrop, the performance of various companies in the optical chip industry chain, including Lightintelligence, has seen explosive growth.
In 2025, Lightintelligence's revenue was 106 million yuan, representing a year-on-year increase of over 70%.
In terms of products, the main driver behind Lightintelligence's revenue surge is Scale-up, which is primarily deployed in AI infrastructure (particularly data centers) to build high-performance &#34;supernodes.&#34;
Supernodes refer to large, tightly interconnected clusters composed of dozens to hundreds of GPUs configured as a single computing unit, specifically designed to handle cutting-edge AI tasks such as the training and inference of large models.
According to Lightintelligence, since these AI tasks require thousands of devices to achieve synchronous communication while processing massive amounts of data, Scale-up products use optical interconnect technology to effectively break through the physical limits of traditional electrical interconnects in terms of transmission distance, bandwidth, and power consumption.
In 2025, Scale-up generated 76 million yuan in revenue, a year-on-year increase of over 60%.
Despite the notable revenue performance, Lightintelligence's growth momentum in the new optical chip track still faces challenges.
On one hand, Lightintelligence's growth rate is not the fastest in the industry. For example, Yuanjie Semiconductor, another company in the optical chip industry chain, saw a 138.5% year-on-year revenue increase in 2025 and has now launched a bid for the Hong Kong stock market, aiming for an &#34;A+H&#34; dual listing.
On the other hand, as product volume increases, Lightintelligence's gross profit margin is &#34;decreasing instead of increasing.&#34; In 2025, the gross profit margin for optical interconnect products, including Scale-up, was 35.1%, a year-on-year decline of 14 percentage points.
According to Lightintelligence's explanation, the primary reasons are increased product integration, testing and verification, and rising outsourcing processing fees, all of which pushed up costs.
Compared to previous generation products, Scale-up EPS not only requires the same optical interconnect modules but must also undergo testing and verification using Lightintelligence's proprietary software related to supernode solutions before delivery, placing further pressure on costs.
<h2>Reliance on Major Customers</h2>
Currently, Lightintelligence's customers mainly include research institutions, internet companies, GPU and server manufacturers, system integrators, and computing infrastructure builders and operators.
As commercialization progresses, Lightintelligence's customer base has expanded, with 11, 10, and 22 new customers added in 2023, 2024, and 2025, respectively.
However, behind this prosperous growth lies extremely high customer concentration.
From 2023 to 2025, the total revenue from the top five customers accounted for approximately 80% of Lightintelligence's total revenue.
Objectively speaking, reliance on major customers is not a phenomenon unique to Lightintelligence.
Looking at industry conditions, the global optical technology leader Lumentum also faces similar issues, with its revenue highly dependent on a few customers such as NVIDIA.
However, such strong customer stickiness and high concentration hide commercial risks that cannot be ignored.
If a top-tier major customer reduces procurement due to its own strategic adjustments or the end of a project cycle, Lightintelligence's revenue will directly face volatility risks.
Over-reliance on major customers also leaves Lightintelligence in a disadvantaged position during price negotiations, further squeezing its already pressured gross profit margins. For major customer G, for example, the gross profit margin in 2025 was only 23.4%, a year-on-year decline of 13 percentage points.
Under the double blow of declining gross margins and high costs, Lightintelligence's total net losses from 2023 to 2025 have approached 2.5 billion yuan.
On the flip side of these massive losses, the IPO timeline is becoming a sword hanging over Lightintelligence's head.
From 2018 to 2025, Lightintelligence completed multiple rounds of pre-IPO financing from Series A to C4 and signed valuation adjustment mechanism (VAM) agreements with investors that included redemption rights tied to listing timelines.
To advance the Hong Kong listing process, Lightintelligence and its investors revised the investment agreements in September 2025, agreeing to temporarily not trigger the redemption rights and other VAM clauses.
However, this is merely a &#34;time-limited waiver.&#34;
According to the agreement, if Lightintelligence fails to obtain listing approval within 24 months from the date of submitting its listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the previously suspended VAM clauses and other arrangements will automatically regain effect with retroactive force.
As of the end of 2025, the amount of financial instruments issued by Lightintelligence to investors reached as high as 4.924 billion yuan.
With no room for retreat, this Hong Kong IPO is destined to be a race against time.

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- The advent of AI has significantly impacted the development of the optical chip industry, highlighted by Nvidia's $2 billion investments in Lumentum and Coherent.  
- Shanghai Xizhi Technology has submitted an IPO to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, aiming to expand its optical interconnect and computing solutions, despite reporting a projected 2025 revenue of only 1.06 billion yuan and a substantial net loss.  
- The company's revenues are heavily reliant on a few major clients, posing risks of revenue fluctuations and challenges in maintaining profit margins amid increasing operational costs.

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No. 1 Market Share, 100 Million Yuan Revenue: Optical Chip Unicorn Lightintelligence Files for Hong Kong IPO Amid "Ice and Fire"