After Hefei and Wuhan, is it finally Zhengzhou's turn to "get a seat at the table"?

The leading computing power enterprise's IPO will be reviewed this week, with Zhengzhou standing behind this move.

According to recent disclosure on the official website of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the Listing Review Committee of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange is scheduled to hold its 61st deliberation meeting in 2026 on November 12, to review the initial public offering application of xFusion Digital Technologies Co., Ltd.

This node has drawn wide public attention, not only because of xFusion's critical position in China's computing power industry — according to the IDC report cited in its prospectus, xFusion ranked second in China's server market share last year, and has steadily taken the first place in China's standard liquid-cooled server market share for four consecutive years, mainly covering AI servers and general-purpose computing server products in data center scenarios.

What is more striking is that it is also a rising tech star backed by the "venture capital" of Henan state-owned assets, with its headquarters settled in Zhengzhou.

Among the leading listed companies in Henan in the past, "CMOC engages in mining, Muyuan Foods focuses on pig breeding, and Mixue Ice City sells milk tea". For this IPO application, xFusion plans to raise 8 billion yuan. Calculated according to the issuance plan, its maximum estimated valuation is about 80 billion yuan.

This is the largest-scale project accepted by the ChiNext board since the IPO tightening policy was implemented. If it passes the review smoothly, it will refresh the historical record of Henan's capital market at one stroke, rewrite the local pattern of leading listed companies dominated by traditional industries, so some people call it "the hope of the whole province".

Hefei is the most widely praised city for its successful "exit" from venture capital investment and accurate bet on the AI trend. Under the strikingly similar scenario now, is Zhengzhou ushering in its own "Hefei moment"?

A new "venture capital" city?

Since the beginning of this year, AI has driven one city after another to catch the industrial trend with its "golden touch".

The achievements of central Chinese cities are undoubtedly the most eye-catching: first, CXMT's total market value exceeded 3.28 trillion yuan on the day of listing, bringing a book floating profit of more than 1 trillion yuan to Hefei state-owned assets; later, YMTC's STAR Market IPO application was accepted. Calculated based on the trillion-yuan market value of YMTC after listing, the corresponding market value of shares held by Henan state-owned assets system will exceed hundreds of billions of yuan.

Henan, which is also located in central China, is eager to make breakthroughs. After CXMT was listed, Henan Daily once published an article asking: "Where is Henan's own CXMT?" After counting BYD in Zhengzhou and CATL in Luoyang, the article pointed out that "most of the chain-leading enterprises in these industries are 'introduced from outside', and the cultivation of local 'chain-leading' enterprises still takes time".

In the eyes of many people, xFusion is exactly the "CXMT" that Henan has been waiting for painstakingly.

The "patience cost" of xFusion is less than the 10-year waiting period of the other two enterprises. Five years ago, in 2021, Xu Zhijun, then rotating chairman of Huawei, publicly pointed out that "our X86 server business has indeed encountered difficulties". In that year, Huawei registered at least 5 companies named after "xFusion" in Suzhou, Shenzhen, Zhengzhou, Xi'an and other places, which was regarded by the outside world as a layout for the X86 server business to seek breakthroughs.

Image source: Zhengzhou Area of China (Henan) Pilot Free Trade Zone

In a sense, compared with Hefei's "bet" on CXMT, Zhengzhou more "took over" Huawei's choice. IDC data shows that at that time, Huawei ranked third in China's server market with a market share of 11.2%, and few people were willing to miss its revenue scale of hundreds of billions of yuan. With the X86 server business wholly spun off to xFusion based in Zhengzhou, Zhengzhou unexpectedly became the "undertaker" of xFusion's headquarters. In November of the same year, Huawei completely withdrew its shareholding, and Henan state-owned assets officially took over.

But xFusion's choice is of great significance to Zhengzhou.

The most remarkable "gain" is undoubtedly the direct "income" from the IPO that took only 5 years to complete. Some people compare the cases of Hefei and Wuhan, and calculate that based on the upper limit of 80 billion yuan valuation, the corresponding book value-added of shares held by Henan state-owned assets exceeds 10 billion yuan.

But this is only the visible benefit. Compared with other more mature "competitors" in the digital economy field, Zhengzhou has obtained an industrial opportunity that emerged "out of nothing". Following that, key supporting links including complete machines, chips, motherboards, memory, hard disks, as well as scientific research projects from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other institutions have settled in succession, driving the scale of Henan's advanced computing industrial cluster to nearly 100 billion yuan. The xFusion Smart Manufacturing Park project started construction in 2026 has attracted more than 80 upstream and downstream enterprises to gather.

Just as memory chips are to Hefei and Wuhan, servers have also become the key for Zhengzhou to step into the AI wave.

Xu Xiaomin, Secretary-General of Guangdong Electronic Information Industry Association, once explained the relationship between AI servers and traditional servers: "Traditional servers rely on CPUs to process serial tasks, while AI servers adopt a heterogeneous architecture of 'CPU + AI acceleration chip'". In other words, servers are no longer just "hardware boxes", but the "computing power base" that supports the operation of new quality productivity.

Driven by xFusion, Zhengzhou, which was not included in the "East Data, West Storage" pattern, has also obtained the "admission ticket" to enter the computing power field. As mentioned in its prospectus, it will drive the local area to "form a server industrial cluster with international competitiveness". In addition, with the core node of the National Supercomputing Internet officially put into operation in Henan this July, Zhengzhou's vision of building a "computing power city" has obtained strong support from two core pillars.

Further transformation of manufacturing?

One question that has not been answered yet is: Why did xFusion settle its headquarters in Zhengzhou?

In 2024, Liu Hongyun, then chairman of xFusion Digital Technologies Co., Ltd., pointed out in a media interview: "We have carried out investigations in many places, and after a very long period of selection, we finally made the decision."

He mentioned three core advantages of choosing Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone:

The first is location advantage: "It occupies an important position in connecting the east and the west, and linking the south and the north in the domestic economic cycle, and is the core growth pole of the Central Plains Economic Zone and Zhengzhou Metropolitan Area". The second is convenient logistics: "Zhengzhou Airport has convenient air transport, the expressway network extends in all directions, and there is also high-speed rail freight, which is a great attraction". The third is rich industrial carrier resources: it not only has complete upstream and downstream industrial supporting facilities, but also has high construction standards, with all types of spaces for R&D, production and warehousing available.

Image source: Zhengzhou Area of China (Henan) Pilot Free Trade Zone

These "keywords" exactly constitute the "manufacturing heritage" accumulated by Zhengzhou over more than a decade.

Looking back at the economic development of Zhengzhou in recent years, manufacturing has always been the main line, and the "background" is always inseparable from the airport economy zone. More than a decade ago, Foxconn settled in the airport economy zone as one of the first batch of enterprises, and its founder Terry Gou gave the reason that he "took a fancy to the airport, population and location here". Another important node was the settlement of BYD in 2021, whose founder Wang Chuanfu once mentioned that "Henan has unique location advantages, as a large province with huge population, it has a huge consumer market and promising development prospects".

Henan's central location in China allows Zhengzhou to continuously gather various production factors and labor force, and distribute various products to the whole country, which also continuously verifies the capability of "Zhengzhou Manufacturing". Data shows that by the end of last year, the total industrial output value of Zhengzhou has exceeded 1.9 trillion yuan, and is about to step over the threshold of 2 trillion yuan.

But at the same time, another voice has emerged: Zhengzhou's manufacturing industry is highly dependent on externally introduced enterprises, and once showed a trend of "high-end industries with low-end positioning".

In 2023, Zhao Deyou, then first-level inspector of the Henan Provincial Bureau of Statistics, once compared the average value-added rate of multiple industries in Zhengzhou. Compared with the overall industrial value-added rate of about 21% of the city, the value-added rate of complete automobile manufacturing is 18.9%, non-ferrous metal calendering processing is 19.4%, and communication equipment manufacturing is only 10.6%. The low value-added rate, lack of core technologies and position in the downstream links of the industrial chain make it urgent to move towards the mid-to-high end of the value chain.

It is worth noting whether xFusion with its headquarters settled in Zhengzhou can bring fundamental changes to "Zhengzhou Manufacturing".

A positive answer comes from xFusion's prospectus: it "helps 'Zhengzhou Manufacturing' to leap from OEM assembly to high value-added links of independent brands, independent manufacturing and independent delivery, promotes 'Zhengzhou Manufacturing' to deeply integrate into the high-end links of the global computing power industrial chain, and provides solid local advanced manufacturing support for the company to participate in international competition and serve the digital infrastructure construction of countries along the Belt and Road Initiative".

Of course, some people pointed out that although server manufacturers have gradually got rid of the old impression of "hardware assembly plants" and taken on the tasks of system architecture design and complete machine integration, the bargaining power of the AI industry is still in the hands of upstream chip manufacturers. The data from xFusion's prospectus also proves this point: the gross profit margin of the company's main business has continued to drop from 14.27% in 2023 to 8.58% in 2025, among which the gross profit margin of AI servers was only 6.55% in 2025.

How to develop strengths and avoid weaknesses will also be a unique topic for Zhengzhou that distinguishes it from other central Chinese cities.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Urban Evolution", author: Yang Qifei, published by 36Kr with authorization.