By Sherry Qin
Chinese AI chip startup Moore Threads' shares rose sharply after it announced plans to launch a new graphics processing unit architecture, boosting investor sentiment amid China's tech self-sufficiency efforts.
The Shanghai-based company's shares rose 19% to 750.00 yuan on Wednesday after surging 425% in its trading debut last week. The latest gains have taken the chip maker's market cap to over 350 billion yuan, equivalent to $49.55 billion.
Moore Threads, founded by a former senior Nvidia executive in 2020, will announce its next-generation GPU design and a product roadmap covering hardware, core technologies, and industry solutions at its developer conference next week, the company said on its official WeChat account on Tuesday.
The news came after the U.S. government's nod to the export of Nvidia's H200 chips, which have higher performance than the H20 that the company was previously allowed to sell.
China is expected to allow some companies to buy Nvidia's H200 chips to speed up the buildout of AI infrastructure and improve Chinese AI models, while continuing to pursue chip self-sufficiency, analysts said.
Investors have cheered on Chinese semiconductor players broadly as Beijing strives to reduce its reliance on foreign chips. Chinese AI chip designer Cambricon Technologies' shares have risen 114% in Shanghai, and China's largest foundry SMIC's stocks have gained 112% in Hong Kong so far this year.
Moore Threads is seen as an Nvidia challenger in China, as it mirrors Nvidia's path to design GPUs, which were mostly used for rendering high-quality images in video games and later adapted for AI training.
Most of Moore Threads' domestic AI chip competitors, like Huawei and Cambricon, design custom-made application-specific integrated circuits.
Despite investor enthusiasm over Moore Threads' stocks, analysts still view it as a second-tier domestic AI chip supplier behind Huawei and Cambricon.
Write to Sherry Qin at sherry.qin@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 09, 2025 23:30 ET (04:30 GMT)
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