China's Nvidia Challenger MetaX Files Confidentially for a Hong Kong IPO

# China's Nvidia Challenger MetaX Files Confidentially for a Hong Kong IPO

Seven months after its shares detonated on their first day of Shanghai trading, the GPU designer MetaX is coming back for more. The Shanghai-based chipmaker has confidentially filed for a listing in Hong Kong and is targeting an initial public offering by the end of 2026, according to people familiar with the plans, working with Huatai International on a deal that would give China's most-hyped Nvidia challenger a second, offshore war chest.

The confidential filing, first reported by the South China Morning Post, adds MetaX to a stampede of Chinese chip and AI companies rushing the Hong Kong exchange. It comes barely half a year after MetaX debuted on Shanghai's Nasdaq-style STAR Market in December 2025, where its stock closed up nearly 693 percent on day one after pricing at 104.66 yuan a share. The rally has not fully cooled: shares are up roughly 564 percent from the offer price, handing the company a market value near 278 billion yuan, or about $41 billion.

Known in Chinese as Muxi, MetaX was founded in 2020 by three veterans of the US chipmaker AMD, chairman Chen Weiliang and co-chief technology officers Peng Li and Yang Jian. As a fabless designer, it draws chips but leaves fabrication to others. Its lineup spans N-series GPUs for AI inference, C-series processors for general-purpose computing and G-series graphics chips, all tied together by MXMACA, an in-house software platform built to be compatible with Nvidia's dominant CUDA ecosystem. Its flagship C600, launched in July 2025, packs 144GB of HBM3e high-bandwidth memory and supports FP8 precision, and the company bills it as "fully domestically produced."

According to the terms disclosed earlier this year, MetaX plans to issue H shares equal to no more than 5 percent of its enlarged share capital. Proceeds, per its filings, would fund the "development and industrialisation of next-generation high-performance general-purpose GPUs," expand its software ecosystem, shore up its supply chain and finance potential acquisitions.

The business underneath the frenzied valuation is still young and still bleeding. Revenue more than doubled to about 1.6 billion yuan in 2025, up from 743 million yuan a year earlier, but the company remains deeply loss-making, with net losses widening to 1.41 billion yuan in 2024. Before its STAR listing, MetaX had already raised more than 10 billion yuan across nine funding rounds from backers including HongShan Capital Group, Matrix Partners China and state-linked vehicles such as the Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Fund. As of March, it reported cumulative sales of more than 25,000 GPUs, with major buyers including China's state-guided computing hubs and telecom-run intelligent computing centers.

The Hong Kong plan lands in the middle of a fundraising wave. Chinese issuers raised roughly $44 billion in Hong Kong equity capital in the first half of 2026, the most in five years, and MetaX's peers are all crowding in. Baidu's chip unit Kunlunxin is chasing a Hong Kong listing at a target valuation near $50 billion, AI lab Moonshot has moved toward a listing that could value it above $30 billion, and rival GPU makers Moore Threads, Biren Technology and Iluvatar CoreX have all gone public or filed since late 2025.

Why it matters

MetaX's dual-market ambition is a direct product of Washington's export controls, and a wager on their permanence. US restrictions have all but locked Nvidia's most advanced accelerators out of China while Beijing simultaneously discourages domestic firms from buying them, creating a captive market that homegrown designers are scrambling to fill.

The scale of the opening is enormous, and so is the gap MetaX must close. Citing Bernstein Research, MetaX's own prospectus noted that in 2024 Nvidia held 66 percent of China's AI accelerator market and Huawei's HiSilicon 23 percent, while MetaX held roughly 1 percent. Bernstein projects China's AI capital spending will climb from $60 billion in 2024 to $147 billion by 2027.

That is the demand pool investors are pricing in, not current earnings. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has put the collapse of his own China business in stark terms. "We went from 95 percent market share to zero," he said in an interview with Citadel Securities, describing the fallout from sanctions and Beijing's guidance against buying Nvidia chips. For China, replacing that lost 95 percent is now a national-security priority as much as a commercial one, and MetaX is one of a handful of startups Beijing is betting can do it. A Hong Kong listing would give it access to international capital and a hedge against the volatility of a mainland market where its stock has swung wildly.

What to watch

The near-term test is whether MetaX's filing converts into a priced deal before year-end, and at what valuation relative to its frothy STAR Market price. Watch the reception of Kunlunxin's and Moonshot's larger offerings as a barometer for appetite. On the technology side, the questions are execution: whether the C600 hits volume production on schedule, whether the promised C700 arrives by 2027, and whether MXMACA can pull developers away from CUDA. And hovering over all of it is the export-control regime itself. Any thaw in US policy, or fresh tightening from Beijing, could reprice the entire domestic-GPU trade overnight.