China's small investors swarmed Shanghai Enflame Technology's IPO like it was the hottest gadget drop. The retail pool was subscribed 4,073 times, with 7 million applications chasing roughly 5.98 trillion yuan ($890 billion) worth of stock. Those tallies come from Bloomberg's read of an exchange filing dated Wednesday. For a yardstick, memory maker CXMT's July float amassed a 7.1 trillion yuan retail book, making it the country's second biggest debut on record.
Enflame set its price at 142.18 yuan a share on Shanghai's STAR Market, selling about 43 million shares. That haul is slated to bring in around 6.12 billion yuan ($911 million) and equates to 10% of the company's enlarged post-listing equity.
Tencent owns a 20% share in Enflame and continues to be its main customer. Purchases by the tech giant represented 84% of Enflame's 2025 revenue, up from about 38% the year before. Its internet and cloud platforms are the main commercial home for Enflame's chips. As the company put it in its prospectus, "Tencent's demand for AI accelerator cards has far exceeded the company's supply capacity," and Enflame has focused on key accounts and large, high-demand deployments to sharpen its technology.
China's AI buildout is minting new listings across the supply chain. Enflame, founded in 2018, is smaller than names like Huawei Technologies Co. and Cambricon Technologies Corp., but it is one of the startups helping assemble a homegrown AI chip stack. Its accelerators power cloud and data center workloads where computing demand is surging.
In times of excitement around new listings, steady strategies still matter, so download the free Always Be Buying E-Book today
The company's hardware runs inside large data centers behind chat assistants, recommendation engines, and generative AI. It is the final member of China's "four little dragons" of AI chipmakers to list, following Moore Threads Technology Co., Biren Technology Co., and MetaX Integrated Circuits. Moore Threads rocketed 425% on its December debut, helping stoke enthusiasm for the group.
The domestic market still leans heavily on overseas components.
Profit is still out of reach, but the trajectory is improving. In 2025, the company cut its net loss to 1.2 billion yuan, compared with 1.5 billion yuan a year earlier. For the first half, the company projected a shortfall of roughly 600 million yuan, alongside revenue expected to rise by more than 200% from a year earlier, landing between 10.6 billion and 11.5 billion yuan. From 2023 to 2025, revenue compounded at better than 80% annually.
Bottom line for your money: investor appetite is hot where computing power is scarce. Enflame's pricing, Tencent pipeline, and tiny but notable market share show where the momentum is in China's AI buildout and why retail money is crowding into the picks-and-shovels of the boom.