A remarkable transformation has occurred: it took nearly a decade for Eoptolink to grow from a market cap of 10 billion to 50 billion yuan, yet the leap from 50 billion to 600 billion yuan happened in just one year.

Based in Chengdu, this optical module company has seen its stock price surge nearly tenfold since last April, becoming the city's highest-valued firm. At the peak of this success, a group of employees has reached a financial milestone. In 2024, when the stock price had yet to show significant momentum, Eoptolink implemented an employee stock ownership plan. A total of 146 employees participated, acquiring 5.6 million shares at an exercise price of 16.168 yuan per share.

Today, the situation is vastly different. At the recent peak price of 625 yuan per share, the employee stock plan corresponds to a market value of approximately 3.5 billion yuan, averaging over 20 million yuan per participant.

This once again highlights the immense wealth-creating power of artificial intelligence.

**Tenfold Surge in a Year, Employees Reap Huge Gains**

The story begins two years ago. In January 2024, before AI demand significantly impacted the optical module industry, Eoptolink had just experienced a decline in both revenue and net profit for 2023. It was at this time that the company launched a new equity incentive plan.

The plan specifics were as follows: 4 million shares were to be granted to 146 employees, including 136 mid-level managers and other core personnel. The grant price was set at 23.24 yuan per share, meaning employees could purchase the company's stock at this price once certain conditions were met.

At that time, Eoptolink's stock was trading around 30 yuan per share, so the grant price did not appear heavily discounted. However, in May 2025, due to the company's 2024 profit distribution, the exercise cost for these incentive shares was adjusted downward to 16.168 yuan per share, and the number of shares increased from 4 million to 5.6 million.

In other words, the shares became cheaper and more numerous for the employees.

The 5.6 million shares were scheduled to vest in three tranches, each tied to specific performance milestones: achieving revenue of no less than 4.5 billion yuan in 2024; cumulative revenue of no less than 11 billion yuan for 2024-2025; and cumulative revenue of no less than 19.5 billion yuan for 2024-2026.

At the time, these revenue targets seemed ambitious, exceeding any previous annual performance. However, the subsequent stock surge proved these hurdles were easily surmountable.

In 2024, the AI boom took hold. Eoptolink's core business, optical modules, became a highly sought-after component of AI computing infrastructure, leading to rapid growth in production and sales. That year, the company's net profit skyrocketed, increasing threefold to surpass 2 billion yuan for the first time, with revenue reaching 8.6 billion yuan.

Consequently, the first vesting condition for the employee stock plan was met effortlessly. In July 2025, Eoptolink announced the unlocking and listing of the first batch of incentive shares, allowing employees to realize gains on 30% of their allotted stock. Based on performance forecasts indicating net profit attributable to shareholders of 9.4 to 9.9 billion yuan for 2025, the revenue scale for the previous year was clearly substantial, making the unlocking of the remaining 70% of shares almost a certainty.

Underpinning this smooth progression, the most exhilarating factor for employees has been Eoptolink's dramatically transformed stock price. Since last April, the share price has climbed steadily from around 50 yuan, recently hitting a peak of 625 yuan per share. At the latest prices, the 146 employees covered by the incentive plan now hold paper wealth valued at approximately 3.5 billion yuan.

**Vocational School Graduate's Venture Becomes Chengdu's First 600 Billion Yuan Company**

This achievement marks the emergence of Chengdu's first company with a market capitalization exceeding 600 billion yuan. On April 22, Eoptolink's market cap reached 620 billion yuan. Among listed companies across the 12 provincial-level administrative regions of Western China, only Kweichow Moutai boasts a higher market value. "Shareholders who held firm since last year have made enormous profits," investors remarked on social media.

It is worth noting that Eoptolink is not a native product of the AI era. Its founder, Gao Guangrong, is a graduate from a vocational secondary school in the 1980s. After studying Industrial Electrical Automation at Chengdu Radio Mechanical School, he began his career as a technician in the optical communication division of Leshan Radio Factory. Over the next decade, he gained experience in various roles—technology, procurement, sales, and management—across several optical communication companies.

It wasn't until 2008, approaching the age of 40, that Gao Guangrong, along with partners like Hu Xuemin, Liao Xuegang, and Huang Xiaolei, founded Eoptolink, focusing on the production and R&D of telecommunications optical modules. Eight years later, in 2016, the company went public on the ChiNext board, and the 47-year-old Gao became the helmsman of a billion-yuan listed company.

Without the tailwind of AI, this might have remained a relatively mature, slower-growth industry. For a long time, Eoptolink's primary business was in the domestic telecommunications market. It was after 2019 that the company began entering the supply chains of overseas cloud giants like Amazon, moving into the data communications sector.

Around the pivotal year of 2024, the global AI race ignited extreme demand for data transmission within and between data centers, leading tech giants to aggressively purchase optical modules and related components. Seizing the opportunity, Eoptolink, leveraging its Linear Drive Pluggable Optic (LPO) technology, secured over 60% of the 800G LPO module orders from Meta and Amazon. Furthermore, it passed certification for NVIDIA's GB200 platform, achieved mass production of 1.6T optical modules, and saw these products account for over 30% of its supply chain offerings.

Now, with Eoptolink successfully surpassing a 600 billion yuan market cap, not only have the incentivized employees benefited, but the wealth of the original founding team has also soared. Based on the recent peak market cap of 620 billion yuan, the holdings of controlling shareholder Gao Guangrong (6.24%) and director Huang Xiaolei (7.12%) are worth over 38 billion yuan and 44 billion yuan, respectively.

**AI Fuels Wealth Creation in China: A Matter of Timing and Destiny**

A wave of epochal opportunity is sweeping across China's high-end manufacturing sector. From optical modules and PCBs to memory chips, liquid cooling, and even the essential but often overlooked power transformers, China's foundational hardware supply chain is solidly capitalizing on the AI boom.

The performance of top optical module stocks like Eoptolink, Zhongji Innolight, and TFC Optical Communication, often referred to collectively, serves as a prime example. Particularly, Zhongji Innolight is not only approaching a market cap of one trillion yuan but has also doubled its net profit for two consecutive years, achieving revenue of 38.2 billion yuan and net profit of 10.7 billion yuan in 2025.

Amid this prosperity, employees within the AI industrial chain are among the first to reap the rewards of this era. A similar scenario of collective employee gains unfolded at memory leader Longsys. As AI evolved from training to inference, making memory chips a core component of AI infrastructure, Longsys's stock price rose from around 90 yuan last September to a peak exceeding 390 yuan per share, a cumulative increase of nearly 300%. Capitalizing on this, in late January of this year, five employee持股 platforms under Longsys transferred 12.57 million shares at 212 yuan per share, successfully realizing approximately 2.7 billion yuan.

Of course, senior executives in key positions have also benefited significantly. As a leading stock in its field, optical chip company Sanan Integrated Circuit has charted an impressive course over the past year, adjusting from around 130 yuan per share to over 1,400 yuan per share today—a more than fifteenfold increase. According to its annual report, vice presidents Pan Yanting and Chen Wenjun, board secretary Cheng Shuo, financial director Chen Zhenhua, core technical staff member Wang Xing, and vice president Wang Yuxi hold stakes ranging from 70,000 to over 300,000 shares each, leading to the concentrated emergence of a new group of wealthy individuals.

Similarly, the wealth effect has swept through the liquid cooling sector, propelled by AI computing demands. From August last year to the present, Envicool's stock price has accumulated gains of over 200%, with its market cap exceeding 100 billion yuan. Among its top ten shareholders, seven seats are occupied by Envicool executives. A rough calculation shows that, excluding chairman Qi Yong, the combined direct holdings of the other six executives exceed 11%, corresponding to a value of over 10 billion yuan at the latest market capitalization.

Currently, the wave of wealth creation centered on Chinese tech firms, particularly in semiconductors, the AI supply chain, and high-end manufacturing, shows no signs of abating. Research firm LightCounting reports that AI demand will continue to drive the optical module market to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 22% from 2026 to 2030.

Amid the excitement, the market awaits another milestone: Zhongji Innolight breaking the one trillion yuan market capitalization barrier. The tides of the era have never so powerfully influenced the rise and fall of fortunes.