Zhang Jianzhong, founder of Moore Threads Technology, is now a billionaire after shares of his Chinese AI chipmaker rocketed 420% on its first day of trading in Shanghai, with investors hoping it will one day be China’s Nvidia.
The 59-year-old chairman and CEO of the Beijing-based company has a net worth of $4.3 billion based on his stake in the company, according to Forbes estimates. Late last month, Moore Threads raised 8 billion yuan ($1.1 billion) by selling 70 million shares at 114.28 yuan per share, according to a prospectus.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The IPO is seen as one of the most highly anticipated offerings in China this year — the retail portion of the share sale drew 2,750 times as many bids as shares were available, thanks to a clawback feature that ended up allocating more shares to individual investors. Moore Threads, whose market capitalization is now 276 billion yuan, said it would use the proceeds to hire and fund research and development.
Before its blockbuster IPO, Moore Threads had attracted a lineup of star investors, including HSG (HongShan Capital Group, previously known as Sequoia China) and the venture arms of Chinese tech heavyweights ByteDance and Tencent. In 2023, it was added to the U.S. government’s entity list, a trade blocklist that effectively blocks the company from accessing sophisticated American chipmaking technologies.
The company is riding China’s technology self-sufficiency drive as the U.S. curbed sales of advanced chips to its key geopolitical rival, according to Kenny Ng, a Hong Kong-based securities strategist at Everbright Securities International, who discussed it via WeChat messages. Surging optimism over locally made chips has also propelled the shares of companies such as Cambricon Technologies. Chen Tianshi, 40, who is Cambricon’s chairman and chief executive officer, became the 11th-richest person in China, with a net worth of $23.4 billion, on Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List.
For Moore Threads, its products span graphics processing units and supporting software for training AI models. The domestic market for such GPUs will expand to 1.3 trillion yuan in 2029 , up from 142.5 billion yuan in 2024, according to a November research note from Shanghai-based brokerage Sinolink Securities.
Moore Threads will likely be an “important force” in replacing suppliers abroad, such as Nvidia, the brokerage said in the note. In the first nine months of this year, sales at the company exploded by 182% year on year to 784.6 million yuan. Its loss shrank to 723.5 million yuan, down 18.7 percent from the same period last year.
It was founded by Zhang, who has worked in the semiconductor industry for nearly two decades. He was head of Nvidia’s China unit for 14 years until 2020, according to the prospectus. The mogul is a former senior executive at Dell and HP in China, according to its prospectus. His wife, Liu Shanshan, served as a company director during its early years before resigning in 2023.
