5Y News | Congratulations to Lightelligence on its Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing today!
The world's first publicly listed AI silicon photonics chip company is born.
On April 28, Lightelligence-P (01879.HK) officially listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, marking the debut of the world's first AI silicon photonics chip stock and becoming the first company in the global optoelectronic hybrid computing sector to enter the public markets. 5Y Capital invested in Lightelligence at its angel round.
On its first trading day, Lightelligence opened at HK$880, up 383% from its IPO price of HK$183.2. As of press time, the company's shares reached HK$885, corresponding to a market capitalization of HK$81.3 billion — continuing the nearly 5,800x oversubscription frenzy seen during its bookbuilding phase.
This Hong Kong listing both reflects capital markets' recognition of the long-term value in the optoelectronic hybrid computing sector and provides the HKEX with a scarce hard-tech AI asset. With access to public market financing, Lightelligence will also accelerate technology iteration and product commercialization, strengthening the foundation of AI computing power and driving the widespread adoption of cutting-edge hardware innovations.
Public information shows that Lightelligence was founded in 2017 by MIT physics PhD Yichen Shen and is a pioneer in technology and commercialization within the global optoelectronic hybrid computing field. Regarding the stock code "01879.HK," Shen noted that 1879 was a landmark year: Edison invented the incandescent light bulb, and light began leading the direction of the Second Industrial Revolution. In the same year, James Clerk Maxwell, founder of classical electrodynamics, passed away, while the great physicist Albert Einstein was born. With "1879," the company pays tribute to these pioneers and is committed to injecting new power into the AI era through light-based technologies.
Currently, global AI industry's demand for computing power is growing exponentially. At the same time, traditional data centers face bottlenecks in bandwidth, power consumption, and latency, with the gap between computing supply and market demand continuing to widen. Against this backdrop, optoelectronic hybrid computing — which introduces optical capabilities for data processing and transmission — is regarded as one of the important technological directions for the evolution of computing infrastructure. According to Frost & Sullivan data, with its two major product lines of optical interconnect and optical computing, Lightelligence has become the world's first company to achieve large-scale deployment of optoelectronic hybrid computing. In 2025, in China's independent Scale-up optical interconnect solutions market, Lightelligence ranked first by revenue with approximately 88.3% market share, supporting multiple thousand-GPU clusters. The company's cumulative global shipments of optical computing chips have ranked first for two consecutive years.
The broad market prospects and asset scarcity have earned Lightelligence high recognition from global capital markets: both the international offering and public offering saw impressive oversubscription multiples, with nearly 5,800x overall. The cornerstone investor roster features an impressive lineup of 20 top global institutions including Alibaba, GIC, BlackRock, and Fidelity International, collectively subscribing for US$209.9 million (approximately HK$1.644 billion), representing 68.14% of the offering shares. Both the oversubscription multiple and cornerstone subscription ratio rank among the top in recent Hong Kong IPO markets.
Looking ahead, Lightelligence stated that the proceeds from this listing will be precisely focused on R&D and technology upgrades for its core business, sustainably advancing the commercialization of key projects including near-package optics (NPO), co-packaged optics (CPO), and the PACE 3 optoelectronic hybrid computing acceleration card. According to the company's plan, 70% of the proceeds will be allocated to R&D over the next five years: 35% focused on the optical interconnect business, with emphasis on high-end silicon photonics chip design and high-speed optoelectronic transmission; another 35% invested in optical computing, concentrating resources on iterating and developing next-generation optoelectronic hybrid computing cards to accelerate commercialization. Through optoelectronic fusion innovation, Lightelligence will continue to deliver efficient, low-power, and scalable underlying computing support for the global AI industry.
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