Zhang Jianzhong, founder of Moore Threads Technology, has joined the billionaire ranks as shares of his Chinese AI chipmaker soared over 420% on its Shanghai market debut amid optimism it could one day become the Nvidia of China.
The 59-year-old chairman and CEO of the Beijing-based firm has amassed a fortune of $4.3 billion based on his stake in the company, according to Forbes estimates. Moore Threads raised 8 billion yuan ($1.1 billion) in late November by selling 70 million shares at 114.28 yuan apiece, according to its prospectus.
The company did not respond to a request for comment. The initial public offering is one of the most anticipated in China this year – with the retail portion of the share sale being oversubscribed by 2,750 times despite a clawback mechanism that eventually allotted more shares to individual investors. Moore Threads now sports a market capitalization of 276 billion yuan and plans to use the proceeds for hiring as well as research and development.
Before its blockbuster IPO, Moore Threads raised funding from a star-studded list of investors including HSG (HongShan Capital Group, formerly known as Sequoia China) as well as the investment arms of Chinese tech giants ByteDance and Tencent. In 2023, it was added to the U.S. government’s entity list, a trade blacklist that prevents it from accessing advanced American chipmaking technologies.
The company is benefiting from China’s push for technology self-reliance amid U.S. restrictions on selling advanced semiconductors to its top geopolitical rival, Kenny Ng, a Hong Kong-based securities strategist at Everbright Securities International, says via WeChat messages. Growing optimism over locally made chips has also vaulted the shares of companies including Cambricon Technologies. Chen Tianshi, Cambricon’s 40-year-old chairman and CEO, is now China’s 11th richest person with a net worth of $23.4 billion, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List.
As for Moore Threads, its products range from graphics processing units to supporting software to train AI models. The domestic market for such GPUs will grow to 1.3 trillion yuan in 2029 from 142.5 billion yuan in 2024, according to a November research note from Shanghai-based brokerage Sinolink Securities.
Moore Threads is likely to become an “important force” in replacing overseas suppliers such as Nvidia, the brokerage wrote in the note. During the first nine months of this year, sales at the company soared 182% year-on-year to 784.6 million yuan. Its loss narrowed to 723.5 million yuan, down 18.7% from the same period a year ago.
Founder Zhang has worked in the semiconductor business for almost 20 years. He led Nvidia’s China unit for 14 years until 2020, the same year he founded Moore Threads, according to the prospectus. The mogul previously worked as a senior executive at Dell and HP in China, its prospectus shows. His wife, Liu Shanshan, was a company director during its early years before stepping down in 2023.