MW 'China's Nvidia' shows that the global chip race is heating up as it basks in post-IPO glow
By Britney Nguyen
Moore Threads shares rose more than 400% after the AI chip company's Shanghai IPO on Friday
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been vocal about his view that China is not far behind the U.S. in the artificial-intelligence race.
As Nvidia pushes to sell its artificial-intelligence chips in China again, a homegrown rival's successful public market debut is signaling that the country is aiming to get to the top on its own.
Shares of Moore Threads Technology, founded by former Nvidia (NVDA) executive Zhang Jianzhong, gained 425% after its initial public offering in Shanghai on Friday, according to FactSet. The AI chip maker's IPO raised $1.13 billion. Moore Threads said it plans to use that money for research-and-development efforts, including in graphics processing units, or GPUs, for training and running AI models, CNBC reported.
The company is "aiming to build a full-stack AI and graphics ecosystem from scratch," Ipek Ozkardeskaya, a senior analyst at Swissquote, said in emailed comments. A full-stack system includes the chips, networking and software to run the chips in a data center.
Ozkardeskaya said Moore Threads' MUSA architecture can handle graphics for gaming applications, as well as AI training and other high-performance computing tasks. The company, which has backing from the Chinese government, has "the goal of becoming China's Nvidia," she added.
Moore Threads joins other Chinese tech firms such as Huawei Technologies and Cambricon Technologies (CN:688256) that are seeking to fill a gap created when Nvidia found itself at the center of geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China. Like Huawei and Cambricon, Moore Threads is included on the U.S. Entity List, which excludes the company from crucial chip-making technologies. Moore Threads was added to the trade blacklist in October 2023.
In August, Cambricon reported that its revenues for the first half of the year jumped more than 4,000% from the previous year to 2.88 billion Chinese renminbi, which translates to about $400 million. The company also swung to a profit.
See: Nvidia's upstart Chinese rival Cambricon just showed 4,000% growth - but don't get too excited
From the archives (June 2025): China's trillion-yuan gamble on AI and chips is creating strange bedfellows
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has lobbied U.S. President Donald Trump to ease restrictions and allow his company to sell more advanced versions of its GPUs to China.
Silicon Valley-based Nvidia makes reduced-capability H20 chips that were designed for the Chinese market to meet U.S. export controls, but earlier this year they were banned by the Trump administration. That decision was later reversed by the president, but Nvidia has struggled to get back into business in China and excluded revenue from H20 shipments to China from its guidance in its last two earnings reports.
U.S. officials have discussed allowing Nvidia to sell its more advanced H200 chips to China, Bloomberg reported last month. The H200 is built on Nvidia's Hopper architecture, and has been used to train powerful AI models from companies such as OpenAI and Meta Platforms (META).
But some in Washington are pushing to stick with tight U.S. restrictions on the export of advanced chips to China, arguing that they are a matter of national security.
The Guaranteeing Access and Innovation for National Artificial Intelligence, or GAIN AI Act, is one of the more recent efforts to curb Nvidia and other U.S. chip makers from selling advanced AI chips to China and other countries deemed to be a threat to U.S. national security. Under the measure, the companies would have to give priority access to its chips to U.S. customers before being allowed to offer them to Chinese firms. However, U.S. lawmakers will likely not include the bill in upcoming defense legislation, Bloomberg reported.
Meanwhile, bipartisan legislation has been introduced to stop the Commerce Department from issuing export licenses to sell chips more powerful than the ones allowed under existing export controls to China, Russia and other countries recognized as adversaries for at least 21/2 years, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. The Secure and Feasible Exports Act would effectively derail Nvidia's efforts to sell its H200 and Blackwell chips to China.
At the same time, Nvidia faces growing challenges in China itself, where the government is pushing local companies to build on Chinese hardware to end reliance on Nvidia and other Western entities. In September, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country's internet regulator, reportedly told major companies including Alibaba Group Holding and ByteDance to not use Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D chip, which was specifically designed for Chinese customers. Nvidia shares fell after the Financial Times report.
"I think we're the first company in history that has been banned on both sides," Huang said during a Wednesday event at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Huang said Nvidia is "simply not competing in China" right now and has "conceded, essentially, the second-largest AI market - the second-largest technology market in the world." Huawei, he said, "is one of the most formidable technology companies the world has ever seen."
Don't miss: Nvidia's Jensen Huang seems to disagree with Trump on this big AI topic
Huang has been vocal in recent months that China is not far behind the U.S. in the AI race - and is actually ahead in areas such as open-source development and energy supply. He thinks that the U.S. has been wrong in asserting that it would be able to set China's AI development back by withholding access to key technologies, he has said.
China's "semiconductor industry has doubled, doubled, doubled," Huang said, while in the West and elsewhere in the world it is growing between 20% and 30% each year.
Doubling every year, compounded, versus annual growth of 20% to 30%, also compounded, it "doesn't take long to catch up," he said.
-Britney Nguyen
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December 05, 2025 14:15 ET (19:15 GMT)
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