Chinese memory maker CXMT's shares continued to roar after dethroning Tencent as China's most valuable company last week, as investor focus shifts toward hardware and artificial-intelligence infrastructure.

CXMT's shares jumped 9% to 60.15 yuan on Monday in Shanghai, taking its market capitalization over 4.02 trillion yuan, equivalent to US$596.17 billion.

A renewed rebound in the global AI trade, tight memory supply, as well as CXMT's very recent public listing with limited freely traded shares have all boosted its shares, analysts said.

CXMT's shares surged 466% on its trading debut last month, topping China's state-owned banks and oil majors to become the most valuable company listed in mainland China.

It then surpassed Hong Kong-listed Tencent Holdings last Thursday, after the Chinese videogame and social media company's aggressive AI spending snuffed out its double-digit earnings growth streak.

The shift indicates that markets' center of gravity has shifted to compute and strategic capacity amid the global AI infrastructure buildout, said Charu Chanana, chief investment strategist at Saxo Markets.

Besides CXMT, Chinese chip foundries Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and Hua Hong Grace Semiconductor rallied 7.3% and 7.1%, respectively, in Hong Kong on Monday, after strong earnings reports last week.

China's chip makers have shouldered the bulk of the country's chip-sufficiency drive, a mission made more urgent by U.S. restrictions aimed at keeping Beijing from catching up on frontiers such as AI.

In particular, CXMT, as the world's fourth-largest producer of dynamic random-access memory, stands at the intersection of the global memory shortage and China's chip-localization efforts, analysts said.

Apple has been testing CXMT memory chips across product lines including iPhones and MacBooks as the U.S. company addresses a memory crunch, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month.

In contrast, China's internet companies, including Tencent and Alibaba Holdings, have had to grapple with challenges such as the country's weak consumer sentiment and shifting government policies in recent years. They have pivoted toward AI, and committed to significant investments in large language models and other AI initiatives, but investors remain skeptical about their monetization timelines.

Tencent's shares have fallen around 25% year to date, while Alibaba has given up roughly 14%.