By Sherry Qin and Kimberley Kao

Shares of Alibaba-backed Lightelligence surged in its Hong Kong debut on strong investor demand, putting the Chinese optical-computing provider's market value at $9.5 billion.

Shares of the company, formally trading as Shanghai Xizhi Technology, rose over fivefold from its IPO price to as high as 930 Hong Kong dollars early Tuesday before paring gains to HK$814.00. It raised net proceeds of HK$2.38 billion, equivalent to US$303.7 million, in its IPO. The company issued 13.8 million shares priced at HK$183.20 each.

The listing attracted cornerstone investors including Alibaba Investment, GIC, and Temasek.

With rapid AI development driving demand for computing power, traditional electrical computing faces mounting bottlenecks in physical limits, cost and scalability. Shanghai-based Lightelligence specializes in optical computing, which uses photons instead of electrons to process information, offering massive advantages in speed and energy efficiency. Optical processors are adept at performing matrix multiplication and other linear algebra operations, which are key calculations used in large language models.

According to Frost & Sullivan, Lightelligence is the first company globally to achieve mass deployment of optoelectronic computing.

Lightelligence also develops optical interconnect technologies used to link computing devices such as graphics processing units, central processing units and storage chips.

The company plans to use about 70% of net proceeds from the IPO for research and development over the next five years and develop its optical interconnect and optical computing businesses.

Lightelligence's revenue rose 77% in 2025, with the optical interconnect business making up almost 80% of its total revenue.

Write to Sherry Qin at sherry.qin@wsj.com and Kimberley Kao at kimberley.kao@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 28, 2026 00:13 ET (04:13 GMT)

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