Among the five top emerging GPU startups, where does Enflame Technology rank?

The market cap rankings of the "Five GPU Dragons" have been rewritten. 

On September 11, Enflame Technology officially listed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, opening at 410 yuan, up 188.37% from the issue price of 142.18 yuan. The intraday share price once surged to 475 yuan, with a maximum increase of over 230%. As of the close of the day, Enflame closed at 397 yuan, up 179.22% on the first trading day, with a total market capitalization of 170.85 billion yuan. This figure has exceeded Moore Threads, ranking second only to MXC Inc. among the Five GPU Dragons. 

Prior to listing, Enflame Technology's issuance valuation was approximately 61.2 billion yuan. This issuance totals 43.0352 million shares, and the issue price corresponds to a 61.8x static price-to-sales ratio after dilution in 2025. At the initial stage of listing, the actual unrestricted tradable shares are only 17.9003 million shares, accounting for 4.16% of the total share capital after issuance, which makes the price fluctuation on the first trading day draw more attention. 

The market enthusiasm had already been reflected before the listing: the final winning rate of Enflame Technology's online issuance is only 0.02455%. But the market Enflame is facing is no longer a market where "there are no domestic computing power targets available for purchase". 

Before it, Cambricon and Hygon Information have become leading listed companies in the domestic computing power sector. Over the past year, Moore Threads and MXC Inc. have successively listed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, while Biren Technology and Iluvatar CoreX have landed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. With Enflame's listing, a group of domestic AI chip startups that have long raised financing in the primary market are gradually entering the secondary market. 

But Enflame is different from the previous several companies. It is the last one to be listed among the Five GPU Dragons, and the only one that chooses the DSA architecture instead of the GPGPU route; it has the smallest revenue scale but the highest customer concentration; it has not yet turned a profit, but its issuance PS ratio exceeds 60x. 

A few years ago, when domestic AI chips were still scarce assets in the capital market, the "domestic substitution" concept itself was enough to bring huge room for market imagination. Now that the five companies have been listed one after another, investors have the opportunity to compare them side by side for the first time: comparing revenue, shipment volume, gross profit margin, and which one is closer to real profitability. 

After all the "Five GPU Dragons" are gathered, what is the actual ranking of Enflame Technology? 

01. Founded 8 years, annual sales of 66,000 units, 1.1 billion yuan in losses

Different from most people's intuitive impression of "domestic GPU companies", Enflame Technology does not produce gaming graphics cards, nor consumer-grade GPUs for personal computers. It targets the AI computing power business in data centers. 

Simply put, when an internet company trains a large model, or a user sends a query to a large model and waits for the model to generate an answer, a large number of chips are required to complete the calculation behind the scenes. Enflame Technology's core products are cloud AI chips for large model training and inference, and it extends from chips to AI acceleration cards and modules, intelligent computing systems and clusters, as well as supporting AI computing and programming software platforms. 

The company was co-founded by two former AMD executives Zhao Lidong and Zhang Yalin. Zhao Lidong graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University, has worked in Silicon Valley for more than 20 years, and has successively served in S3, Juniper Networks and AMD. Zhang Yalin is 12 years younger than him, graduated from the Department of Electronics and Information Systems of Fudan University, joined AMD from Shanghai Qima Digital, and eventually became a senior chip manager at AMD and technical director of its China R&D center. 

In March 2018, the two founded Enflame Technology in a temporary office in Zhangjiang, Shanghai. It was the last round of artificial intelligence boom, NVIDIA had already become a major player in the AI training market relying on GPUs, and domestic AI chip entrepreneurship in China also began to heat up. 

Over the past eight years, Enflame has completed four generations of architecture iterations and launched 5 cloud AI chips. In the past few years, the explosion of large AI models has pushed this business to the forefront of the industry rapidly. 

In 2025, the total shipment volume of China's AI acceleration cards was about 4 million units. Among them, NVIDIA still occupied an absolute advantage, with shipments of about 2.2 million units and a market share of about 55%. However, domestic manufacturers have also started to get more orders. In the same year, Enflame Technology's AI acceleration cards and modules reached sales of 66,000 units, corresponding to a domestic market share of about 1.7%.

66,000 units is not a very large number, but it is a key node for observing Enflame Technology. 

The commercialization of chip startups often goes through a long process: from design, tape-out, to customer testing and verification, and then to actual bulk procurement, every step requires capital and time. For Enflame, 66,000 units means it has entered the stage of large-scale shipment. 

This change is also reflected in the revenue structure. 

Enflame's revenue comes from three segments: AI acceleration cards and modules, intelligent computing systems and clusters, IP licensing and others. The chips themselves are not sold separately, but delivered in the form of acceleration cards or modules, or further integrated into intelligent computing systems for customers. 

In 2025, Enflame Technology's AI acceleration cards and modules generated revenue of 856 million yuan, contributing more than 86% of the company's total revenue, and has become the absolute main source of income. In contrast, the revenue proportion of intelligent computing systems and clusters has decreased significantly. 

However, even though both are making AI chips, Enflame is not following the path that NVIDIA has verified. 

At present, there are roughly two types of technical routes for cloud AI chips. One is the GPGPU architecture represented by NVIDIA, which is also the route chosen by domestic manufacturers such as Moore Threads, MXC Inc., Biren Technology and Iluvatar CoreX; the other is the DSA architecture, whose domestic representative players include HiSilicon, Cambricon and Enflame Technology. 

The biggest difference between the two can be understood as "general purpose" and "special purpose".

GPGPU was originally derived from GPU, with enhanced general parallel computing capabilities. It can not only perform AI calculations, but also cover scenarios such as scientific computing and graphics rendering. NVIDIA has built the CUDA software ecosystem on top of the hardware, with a large number of developers, models and applications running around this system, which forms its deepest moat. 

The idea of DSA is different. It does not pursue to cover as many computing scenarios as possible, but uses more chip area and transistors for AI computing, and optimizes AI tasks in computing, storage and interconnection links. It sacrifices part of the versatility in exchange for higher computing efficiency and energy efficiency ratio in specific scenarios. Enflame's self-developed GCU-CARE computing unit is continuously iterated along this line of thinking. 

This is a route with both gains and losses.

On the one hand, as large models enter the stage of large-scale application, the demand for inference is growing, and the importance of computing power cost and energy consumption is also rising, so DSA optimized for AI tasks has its own opportunities; on the other hand, not following GPGPU means that Enflame cannot directly enjoy the CUDA ecosystem established by NVIDIA. Customers who migrate from the original computing platform need to re-complete the adaptation of models, operators and software. Therefore, for Enflame, competition is not only about manufacturing a chip with sufficient performance, but also building a software system that can make the chip truly usable. 

To this end, Enflame has developed the "TopsRider" AI computing and programming software platform outside the hardware, covering drivers, compilers, operator libraries and other components, and further extending to intelligent computing systems and large-scale clusters. To a certain extent, this also explains why AI chip business is such a capital-intensive industry. 

While the products are constantly maturing, revenue has started to grow significantly. 

From 2023 to 2025, Enflame Technology's operating revenue was 301 million yuan, 722 million yuan and 990 million yuan respectively, with a cumulative increase of more than twice in two years. In the same period, the company's attributable net profit was -16.65 billion yuan, -15.10 billion yuan and -11.64 billion yuan respectively. Although the losses have narrowed continuously, the cumulative loss in three years has exceeded 43 billion yuan. 

The capital mainly flows to R&D. 

From 2023 to 2025, Enflame Technology's R&D investment accounted for 408.01%, 181.66% and 114.63% of operating revenue respectively. The continuous decline in the proportion does not mean that the company no longer spends heavily, but more because the revenue scale has started to rise. 

This is also the most distinct fundamental feature of Enflame Technology at present: on the one hand, chips are moving from tape-out and verification to mass shipment, and the revenue scale is getting larger and larger; on the other hand, the R&D investment required to maintain product iteration remains high, and the revenue generated from commercialization is not enough to cover R&D expenses. 

02. Among the Five GPU Dragons, what is Enflame's ranking?

On the first day of listing, the capital market has ranked Enflame Technology for the first time. 

As of the close of A-shares on September 11, Enflame Technology closed at 397 yuan, up 179.22%, with a total market capitalization of 170.85 billion yuan; Moore Threads closed at 357.85 yuan, with a total market capitalization of 168.2 billion yuan; MXC Inc. closed at 489 yuan, with a total market capitalization of 195.649 billion yuan. As of around 3 p.m. that day, the share prices of Iluvatar CoreX and Biren Technology on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange were HK$310 and HK$35 respectively, with total market capitalization of HK$83.4 billion and HK$91.1 billion. 

Calculated based on this, Enflame Technology has surpassed Moore Threads, Biren Technology and Iluvatar CoreX, temporarily ranking second among the Five Dragons, second only to MXC Inc. 

But if we change the comparison dimension from market capitalization to revenue, Enflame's ranking will change immediately.

In 2025, MXC Inc. achieved revenue of 1.644 billion yuan, Moore Threads 1.506 billion yuan, Biren Technology and Iluvatar CoreX 1.035 billion yuan and 1.034 billion yuan respectively, and Enflame Technology 990 million yuan. According to the revenue scale, Enflame ranks last. However, there is no obvious gap between the third and fifth place. The revenue of Biren, Iluvatar and Enflame is around 1 billion yuan, with a difference of only about 45 million yuan between the highest and the lowest. 

Since the beginning of this year, this ranking has also begun to change. 

In the first half of 2026, Moore Threads, MXC Inc., Biren Technology, Enflame Technology and Iluvatar CoreX achieved revenue of 1.736 billion yuan, 1.324 billion yuan, 1.236 billion yuan, 1.120 billion yuan and 946 million yuan respectively. Enflame surpassed Iluvatar CoreX, rising from fifth to fourth; and its half-year revenue of 1.120 billion yuan has exceeded the full-year revenue of 2025. 

If we change the dimension to shipment volume, Enflame's position is different again. 

In the IDC report, MXC's shipment volume in 2025 was also about 66,000 units, Iluvatar CoreX about 50,000 units, while Moore Threads and Biren were not listed separately by IDC. That is to say, Enflame, whose revenue ranks last among the "Five Dragons", does not lag behind in the disclosed shipment scale. However, shipment volume only reflects one side of commercialization. For a chip company that is still in the period of high R&D investment, high gross profit margin is also very important. 

According to the data given in Enflame's prospectus, Enflame's main business gross profit margin was 31.78% in 2025. In the same period, the gross profit margins of Moore Threads, MXC, Biren and Iluvatar CoreX were 69.8% (note: Moore's annual report disclosed 65.57%), 56.51%, 53.84% and 53.99% respectively. Even since 2023, Enflame's gross profit margin has been at the lowest level, far below the average. 

At the same time, Enflame's R&D investment in 2025 reached 1.135 billion yuan, accounting for 114.63% of revenue, which means the annual R&D investment even exceeded the annual revenue. This also explains why Enflame, whose revenue has grown rapidly, is still