Tencent-Backed AI Chipmaker Enflame Opens Shanghai STAR Market IPO Subscription, Targeting $911M at ~$9B Valuation

Enflame Technology, a Shanghai-based AI chipmaker majority-customer-backed by Tencent, opened subscriptions on September 2 for its Shanghai STAR Market IPO, pricing shares at 142.18 yuan (~$21.15) each and targeting roughly 6.12 billion yuan (~$911 million) in proceeds at an implied valuation near 61.2 billion yuan (~$9 billion). Tencent, which accounted for 83.8% of Enflame's 2025 revenue and holds about 20.3% of the company including related parties, took a strategic placement allocation worth roughly 248 million yuan. Enflame is the last of China's four closely watched 'little dragon' GPU startups — after Moore Threads, MetaX and Biren Technology — to reach public markets, and differentiates itself with a domain-specific-architecture (DSA) chip design aimed at AI inference rather than general-purpose GPU competition with Nvidia. The retail portion of the offering drew extraordinary demand, oversubscribed more than 4,000 times as Chinese investors continued piling into the AI-chip IPO wave that has already delivered blockbuster debuts for CXMT and Unitree Robotics this year.