A year ago, Iluvatar CoreX was a Shanghai chipmaker that sold mostly to the Chinese state. This week it is trying to raise about $850m from investors who cannot seem to get enough of it, according to Bloomberg, riding a share price that has more than tripled since January.
The rally is really the whole story. Iluvatar only listed in Hong Kong six months ago, where it pulled in roughly $475m, and a raise this size would take what it has drawn from public markets close to $1.3bn.
It is not hard to see why the moment is now. With Nvidia’s best chips walled off by US export controls, Chinese buyers are casting around for anything homegrown that comes close, and the money has started chasing them.
None of this would be happening without the export rules. Two years of tightening restrictions have done what Beijing’s subsidies could not, handing local chipmakers a captive market simply by making the obvious foreign option unavailable.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!That demand is no longer hypothetical. Iluvatar is in talks to sell ByteDance at least 50,000 chips this year, most of them for inference, the lighter work of running models rather than training them.
