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.
Enflame 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.
The Tencent question
Enflame’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.
That 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.
