Shares of China’s leading memory chip maker soared about 470% on its first day of trading Monday, quickly making it the most valuable company on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
ChangXin Memory Technologies, known as CXMT, had already completed Asia’s largest IPO this year, valuing the company two weeks ago at more than $85 billion.
After trading opened on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, investors pushed its valuation to more than $485 billion. That’s well ahead of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the former largest company, valued at about $385 billion.
Trading of CXMT shares started at 49.50 renminbi, up from the IPO price of 8.66 renminbi.
This exceptional start to trading follows global volatility and a recent sell-off in technology stocks. Investors have questioned the stratospheric valuations of Silicon Valley companies that are investing heavily to pursue the development of artificial intelligence.
CXMT, a decade-old company little known outside its home country, is a pillar of China’s drive to support local suppliers to reduce its dependence on foreign companies in the race for AI leadership. And it is a growing Chinese chipmaker at a time of growing tensions between the United States and China and concern in the United States that China is quickly catching up.
The global race for AI dominance has generated an explosion in demand for memory chips, which instantly transfer data to and from computers’ processing engines. All computers rely on memory chips, but the requirements for massive AI data centers being built in the United States and China are virtually limitless. As demand has increased, so have prices.
CXMT’s revenue jumped to nearly $7.5 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up more than 700% from the year-ago period, according to its IPO prospectus. And the company reported a profit of more than $1 billion last year, compared to a loss of $2.8 billion in 2023.
CXMT is beginning to make inroads into the global memory market, dominated by two South Korean companies, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, and an American company, Micron Technology. CXMT had 8% of the global market in the first quarter of 2026, up from 3% a year earlier, according to technology market research firm Counterpoint Research.
Two weeks ago, SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion by selling American depositary receipts, in the largest stock sale on Wall Street by a non-U.S. company.
