MetaX Files Confidentially for a Hong Kong IPO

MetaX, one of the Shanghai chip designers China is counting on to loosen Nvidia’s (NVDA ) grip on its data centers, has confidentially filed for a listing in Hong Kong and is targeting an initial public offering by the end of 2026, according to the South China Morning Post, which cited people familiar with the matter. The company is working with Huatai International Financial Holdings on the share sale, the report said. MetaX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For a five-year-old GPU maker still deep in the red, the move is about one thing: capital. Building a credible alternative to Nvidia means years of spending on silicon, high-bandwidth memory supply, and the software layer that has to sit beneath it, and a second listing widens the pool of investors MetaX can tap to fund that bill.

A confidential path, opened the same day

The filing surfaced hours after Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing said it would let every listing applicant keep its application confidential, part of the bourse’s biggest set of listing reforms since 2018. Confidential filing lets a company move through the exchange’s review without publishing a draft prospectus or its timeline until close to launch, an option that appeals to chip and AI firms wary of tipping off rivals during a long vetting process.

MetaX’s board had already cleared the path. In June 2026, the company said in a filing that it planned to issue H shares — stock listed in Hong Kong — equal to no more than 5% of its enlarged capital, with proceeds earmarked for next-generation GPU development, its software ecosystem, supply-chain investments and potential acquisitions. Shareholders approved the plan at a meeting later that month.

From a Shanghai frenzy to global capital

The Hong Kong plan follows one of the most extreme debuts in recent Chinese market history. When MetaX listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market on December 17, 2025, it raised about 4.2 billion yuan, or roughly $600 million; the stock then jumped close to 700% on its first day, pushing the implied value of the company past 300 billion yuan, about $42 billion.

That surge was a statement of policy conviction more than a price. Shanghai’s retail-heavy market treated MetaX as a proxy bet on Chinese chip independence, while Hong Kong, where European, US and Southeast Asian institutional money trades alongside mainland capital, tends to price the same story with more arithmetic attached. A listing there also gives MetaX a reference price in a freely convertible market that global funds can access without mainland quota friction, the same calculation drawing a wave of Chinese AI companies, including Moonshot AI, toward the city.

A money-losing challenger with a software problem

The numbers underneath the valuation are those of a company still early in its build-out. MetaX reported that 2025 revenue more than doubled to about 1.6 billion yuan while it posted a net loss of roughly 800 million yuan; first-quarter 2026 revenue rose about 75% as losses narrowed. Its flagship C500 delivers around 75% of the performance of Nvidia’s A100 by MetaX’s own figures, with a newer C600 adding high-bandwidth memory and a C700 due for mass production in 2027.

The harder climb is software. Nvidia’s advantage rests as much on its CUDA programming stack, nearly two decades of libraries and developer tooling, as on the chips themselves, which is why MetaX’s funding plan lists “software ecosystem expansion” alongside silicon. Money buys wafers and memory; it does not buy the compatibility layer that gets hyperscalers to standardize on a new GPU rather than merely test one, the same barrier facing domestic peers trying to run large models on homegrown chips.

A fundraising wave behind China’s chip push

MetaX is moving in a crowd. Rival Biren Technology became the first Chinese GPU start-up to go public in Hong Kong in early 2026 and has since sold about $890 million more in new shares to ramp production; Moore Threads, backed by Tencent and ByteDance, soared more than 400% on its own Shanghai debut; and Iluvatar CoreX has completed a Hong Kong listing of its own. The rush tracks Beijing’s semiconductor self-reliance drive and Washington’s export controls, which have kept Nvidia’s most capable accelerators out of China and, since late 2025, allowed its H200 in only with a 25% fee attached.

For MetaX, the year-end target sets a clear test. Shanghai’s retail investors were willing to fund a loss-making chipmaker on the promise of what it might become. Whether Hong Kong’s institutional buyers price that promise as generously, with profitability still out and a CUDA-sized software gap to close, will say more about the durability of China’s GPU boom than any single debut-day pop.