{"slug": "tencent-backed-enflame-wins-approval-for-an-888m-ipo-the-last-of-chinas-four-ai", "title": "Tencent-backed Enflame wins approval for an $888m IPO, the last of China’s ‘four AI chip dragons’", "summary": "Tencent-backed AI chip startup Enflame won approval for a 6 billion yuan ($888m) IPO on Shanghai's STAR board, becoming the last of China's 'four AI chip dragons' to go public. The company, which relies on Tencent for 84% of its revenue, plans to use proceeds for next-generation chips as Beijing pushes domestic alternatives to Nvidia amid US export controls.", "body_md": "The Enflame IPO is on. Shanghai Enflame Technology, an AI-chip startup backed by Tencent, has won listing-committee approval to raise about 6 billion yuan ($888m) on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR board, according to Bloomberg. It is the last of China’s “four little dragons,” the cohort of homegrown AI chipmakers Beijing is counting on to break its reliance on Nvidia.\n\nEnflame plans to sell 10 to 15 per cent of its shares and pour the proceeds into its next two generations of AI cloud chips and the software around them. Founded in Shanghai in 2018 by ex-AMD engineer Zhao Lidong, the company was last valued at about $2.8bn before the listing, per the Hurun index.\n\n## The Tencent question\n\nEnflame’s biggest strength is also its biggest risk: Tencent. The tech giant owns roughly 20 per cent of the company and, by Bloomberg’s account, bought about 84 per cent of its revenue in 2025, up from around 38 per cent a year earlier. Tencent is backer and buyer at once.\n\nThat has upsides. Tencent pre-funds Enflame’s roadmap with orders, which is how a startup with barely 1 per cent of China’s market ships advanced silicon at all. The company says Tencent’s demand has “far exceeded” what it can supply.\n\nBut a chipmaker that leans on one client for most of its sales is exposed if that client’s priorities shift, and the relationship already squeezes Enflame’s prices. It is also deep in the red: cumulative losses run to about 4.29 billion yuan (roughly $600m) over three years, though the annual loss is narrowing.\n\n## Why China is cheering anyway\n\nInvestors are buying the bigger story. With US export controls choking off Nvidia’s best chips, Beijing wants domestic substitutes, and last year it loosened STAR-board rules to let loss-making hardware firms list. The result is a wave of AI-chip floats riding the same logic as China’s [$295bn plan to build data centres that lock Nvidia out](https://thenextweb.com/news/china-295-billion-ai-data-centre-plan).\n\nEnflame’s three fellow “dragons”, Moore Threads, Biren, and MetaX, have all already listed on the STAR board and trade well above their offer prices, with Moore Threads up 425 per cent on its December debut. That receptive backdrop is part of why Enflame can raise nearly $900m while still losing money.\n\nThe same drive is pushing buyers like [ByteDance toward domestic chips](https://thenextweb.com/news/bytedance-iluvatar-corex-ai-chips), and inventing workarounds such as [photonic computing](https://thenextweb.com/news/china-photonics-lab-ai-chips-us-curbs).\n\n## What the listing really tests\n\nEnflame has real products, not slideware: its latest chip packs 144GB of on-chip memory, and an earlier model shipped tens of thousands of units. But it still trails Huawei and a now-profitable Cambricon at home, even as it relies on a single anchor client and Nvidia chips that [keep finding side doors back into China](https://thenextweb.com/news/nvidia-vera-cpu-china).\n\nSo the float is a referendum. Its pricing and demand will show how much conviction Chinese institutions really have in the country’s AI-chip-independence story, and whether that conviction survives a hard look at a balance sheet carrying $600m in losses and a customer list of essentially one.\n\nChina needs a credible public champion for its chip ambitions. Enflame is one of the strongest candidates, and the most dependent.\n\n## Get the TNW newsletter\n\nGet the most important tech news in your inbox each week.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tencent-backed-enflame-wins-approval-for-an-888m-ipo-the-last-of-chinas-four-ai", "canonical_source": "https://thenextweb.com/news/enflame-ipo-china-ai-chip-dragons-tencent", "published_at": "2026-06-15 12:14:29+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-15 13:43:24.144246+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-chips", "ai-startups", "ai-policy", "ai-infrastructure", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Enflame", "Tencent", "Shanghai Stock Exchange", "Nvidia", "Moore Threads", "Biren", "MetaX", "ByteDance"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tencent-backed-enflame-wins-approval-for-an-888m-ipo-the-last-of-chinas-four-ai", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tencent-backed-enflame-wins-approval-for-an-888m-ipo-the-last-of-chinas-four-ai.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tencent-backed-enflame-wins-approval-for-an-888m-ipo-the-last-of-chinas-four-ai.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tencent-backed-enflame-wins-approval-for-an-888m-ipo-the-last-of-chinas-four-ai.jsonld"}}