China’s ‘little Nvidia’ aspires to become ‘leading global player’ after shares soar 468%

Moore Threads, a five-year-old graphics processing unit (GPU) developer created by Nvidia’s former China chief, aspires to become one of the leading global players in artificial intelligence chip development, its founder and CEO Zhang Jianzhong said.\nZhang, Nvidia’s China general manager from 2006 to 2020, was quoted as saying by the official Shanghai Securities Journal that the start-up would introduce a new-generation chip each year to provide key hardware for China’s AI development.\n“Our goal is to become a leading GPU player with international competitiveness,” Zhang said. The interview was published on Friday, the day Moore Threads’ Shanghai-listed shares soared 468 per cent in its market debut, as Chinese investors scrambled to own a piece of what is considered the country’s best answer to Nvidia.\nZhang said it was vital for the Chinese government to keep supporting local GPU development.\n\n“Policy support is a ‘booster’ for strategic hi-tech industries to make breakthroughs,” Zhang was quoted as saying. If the domestic supply chain can support locally developed GPUs, that would help improve the products and in turn drive the core competitiveness of China’s semiconductor industry, Zhang said.\nWhile the market cap of Moore Threads, which currently stands at about US$40 billion, is less than 1 per cent of Nvidia’s US$4.5 trillion, the Beijing-based company is quickly emerging as a key piece of the puzzle in Beijing’s pursuit of AI tech self-sufficiency.\nUnlike Huawei Technologies, Moore Threads’ GPUs, along with its own MUSA platform, are compatible with Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem, making it easier for Chinese users of Nvidia chips to migrate over.\nZhang, who worked for Hewlett-Packard and Dell before Nvidia, said the funds raised from the Shanghai initial public offering (IPO) would be partly used to finance development of AI chips that can be used for both training and inference. The chips, combined with advanced memory, can form clusters of thousands or even tens of thousands of units.\nThe company’s IPO on Shanghai’s Star market set a record in terms of approval speed, with the whole process only taking three months, a sign of Beijing’s desire to pump private capital into strategic sectors.\nMoore Threads said it generated 700 million yuan (US$99 million) in revenues in the first half of 2025, which exceeded the sum of its revenues over the past three years. However, the company made a loss of 270 million yuan in the first half, but said it expects to achieve breakeven in 2027.\n