China’s Nvidia Just Jumped 400% on Debut. How the AI Chip Stocks Compare.

Nvidia is currently unable to sell its chips in China. (Akio Kon/Bloomberg)

Key Points

• Moore Threads’ stock surged 425% on its first trading day, closing at 600.5 yuan ($84.92) per share.
• The Chinese chip designer’s market capitalization reached nearly $40 billion, significantly less than Nvidia’s nearly $4.5 trillion valuation.
• Moore Threads aims to compete in China’s artificial intelligence chip market, a sector Nvidia’s CEO estimates at $50 billion annually.

Chinese chip designer Moore Threads surged more than fivefold on its first day of trading Friday. But it still has a long way to go to rival U.S. semiconductor leader Nvidia .

Moore Threads rose 425% from its initial public offering price to close at 600.5 yuan ($84.92). It raised more than $1 billion in the IPO.

The company is one of multiple Chinese semiconductor designers hoping to take advantage of the gap left by Nvidia’s current absence from China’s artificial-intelligence chip market. Notably, Moore Threads was founded in 2020 by Zhang Jianzhong, formerly an executive at Nvidia.

That should give the company some credibility, but it has a long way to go before matching its founder’s former employer. Moore Threads ended the day with a market capitalization of 282.3 billion yuan, equivalent to slightly under $40 billion, according to LSEG data. Nvidia is worth nearly $4.5 trillion.

Moore Threads has released four generations of graphics-processing units. However, the specifications of its S4000 AI chip are well behind those of Nvidia’s older H100 chips. Nvidia’s H100 was released in 2022 and has since been superseded by later generations of its Hopper chips and its new Blackwell AI semiconductors.

Moore Threads isn’t only far behind Nvidia and other Western companies, it is still a small player in the Chinese domestic market compared with companies such as Huawei or Cambricon Technologies .

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has previously said China represents a $50 billion market for AI infrastructure, growing at 50% a year. He has lobbied hard for U.S. permission to sell chips to Chinese customers, arguing it is better to lock China’s companies into dependence on American hardware. However, that has raised the ire of Beijing, which has discouraged its companies from buying Nvidia chips.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com