3 SEP 2026 — Enflame Technology, the last of China's four AI chip startups to reach the public market, raised about 6.12 billion yuan on Shanghai's STAR Market at 142.18 yuan a share. Two oversubscription numbers are in circulation: 6,109 times and 4,073 times. Both are correct, but they count different tranches at different moments, and neither says anything about conviction. The number that describes the business is that Tencent supplied 83.8 per cent of last year's revenue and holds about 20.3 per cent of the shares.
What is known
Enflame sold more than 43 million shares, roughly 10 per cent of its enlarged capital, valuing the company at about 61.2 billion yuan. Subscriptions opened on 2 September and the shares listed on 3 September. Proceeds are earmarked for its fifth and sixth generation AI chips and the surrounding hardware and software.
Revenue rose from 301 million yuan in 2023 to 990 million yuan in 2025. The net loss narrowed over the same period from 1.7 billion yuan to 1.2 billion yuan. Inference products account for more than 80 per cent of revenue. Tencent is both the largest shareholder and the largest customer, and took a further 1.75 million shares in the offering, worth about 248 million yuan.
Why there are two oversubscription numbers
The 6,109 figure is the multiple on the online tranche. The 4,073 figure is the multiple across the retail portion after Enflame moved 3.4 million shares out of the offline tranche and into the online one in response to demand, which increased the denominator and mechanically lowered the ratio.
Wire services published both figures within hours of each other, so the same offering appeared under two headline multiples. Neither publication is wrong. A reader comparing one story's number against another company's without checking which tranche is being counted will draw a conclusion from the accounting rather than the demand.
The final split was 30 per cent online and 70 per cent offline after the reallocation. Any multiple quoted for this deal has to say which tranche it counts.
An oversubscription multiple measures the lottery
Roughly 7 million accounts submitted orders for 42.1 billion shares against an offering of 43 million. The allocation rate was 0.025 per cent, one of the lowest on the mainland this year.
That structure is why the multiple is a poor measure of enthusiasm. Chinese retail subscription works like a ballot. Applying costs nothing until an allocation is won, so an investor with modest interest and one with strong conviction both apply for the maximum. The ratio counts participants rather than the money anyone intended to commit, and a larger multiple mostly means more accounts saw the announcement.
Recent listings on the same market make that concrete. MetaX allocated 0.033 per cent and rose 693 per cent on its first day. Moore Threads allocated 0.036 per cent and rose 425 per cent. Enflame's allocation is tighter but still inside the same narrow band, and a fixed 10 per cent float against a national retail base produces that band almost regardless of the company.
One customer, two roles
The customer concentration figure is the one worth reading twice. Tencent accounted for 83.8 per cent of Enflame's 2025 revenue while holding about 20.3 per cent of its equity, and it bought more stock in the offering.
An anchor customer that is also an anchor shareholder helps during a build-out. It gives a chip designer committed volume, real workloads to tune against, and a partner with a reason to tolerate early silicon. That is exactly what a company shipping its fifth generation needs.
It also means the public shareholders are buying a supplier relationship rather than a market position. Enflame's revenue line is, to a first approximation, a line item in Tencent's procurement budget, and the terms of that relationship are set between a company and its own large shareholder. Nothing in the offering documents lets an outside investor judge whether the transfer price is a market price.
The valuation argues against the mania reading
The natural interpretation of a 6,000-times multiple is a bubble, and the pricing does not support it. At about 61.8 times 2025 sales, Enflame came to market at roughly a third of the multiple its listed rivals were trading on in late August, when Moore Threads stood at around 167 times and MetaX around 164 times.
The combination is unusual: expensive in absolute terms and cheap relative to its own sector. The relative price is the more informative part. Whoever set it left room, either because the underwriters were cautious or because a business that is 84 per cent one customer commands a discount from the institutions doing the offline book.
So the retail ratio and the institutional price tell opposite stories about the same company on the same day. The price is the one backed by money that had to be committed.
What the region should take from this
The strategic point is not the listing. It is that domestic Chinese silicon has found its business in inference rather than training. More than 80 per cent of Enflame's revenue comes from inference parts, serving a customer with a fixed, enormous and predictable workload.
Inference is the easier target. It tolerates lower memory bandwidth, benefits less from the interconnect advantages that keep training on Nvidia, and the workload sits with the buyer rather than with a research team that can insist on particular tooling. It is also where the volume goes once a model is deployed rather than developed.
For Southeast Asian operators weighing their accelerator options, that is the segment where a near-term alternative to a constrained Nvidia allocation is most plausible. Whether these parts leave China in quantity is a separate question, and one that Enflame's dependence on a single domestic customer does not encourage anyone to answer optimistically.
