ZhenFund Early-Stage Project MetaX Clears STAR Market IPO Review

On October 24, MetaX's IPO application successfully passed the review of the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market listing committee. The five-year-old GPU company carries the critical mission of achieving autonomous control over China's computing infrastructure.

At a pivotal moment when the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee was mapping out the 15th Five-Year Plan, hard-tech industry support policies continued to intensify. The session explicitly called for "accelerating high-level self-reliance in science and technology to lead the development of new quality productive forces." This orientation is fully reflected in the optimization of the STAR Market system, which provides institutional guarantees for hard-tech enterprises that have not yet turned a profit but have achieved significant technological breakthroughs. As a still-unprofitable hard-tech enterprise, MetaX — if it successfully lists — will enter the STAR Market's growth tier, becoming another exemplary case following the implementation of the "1+6" reform measures.

The semiconductor industry, positioned as a "strategic pillar for national development," is receiving integrated support spanning policy, funding, and market access.

MetaX's IPO aims to raise 3.904 billion yuan, primarily directed toward projects including the R&D and industrialization of new high-performance general-purpose GPUs and next-generation AI inference GPUs — underscoring China's resolute determination to achieve autonomous control in the high-end chip sector.

Founded in Shanghai on September 14, 2020, MetaX focuses on full-stack high-performance GPU chips and computing platforms, with the goal of becoming a globally competitive GPU enterprise. The company was co-founded by three veteran Chinese scientists from AMD — Weiliang Chen, Li Peng, and Jian Yang — all of whom held senior positions at AMD.

Founder Dr. Weiliang Chen brings over 20 years of chip R&D experience, having led teams to tape out and mass-produce multiple high-performance GPU products. Co-founder Li Peng is a seasoned chip architecture expert who served as lead architect on several complex high-end GPU designs. Co-founder Dr. Jian Yang is an expert in 3D graphics and high-performance computing ecosystems, with extensive experience in GPU chip design and software ecosystem development.

Leveraging the core team's deep understanding of the GPU industry chain, MetaX has advanced its commercialization ahead of the industry.

The MetaX Xiyun C500 training-and-inference GPU returned from tape-out in June 2023 and entered formal mass production in February 2024. As of March 31, 2025, MetaX had sold over 25,000 GPUs. According to disclosure in its inquiry response, as of September 5, 2025, the company had 1.43 billion yuan in orders on hand — nearly double its full-year 2024 revenue.

MetaX is among the first domestic companies with both GPU chip design capabilities and commercial deployment track records. In cluster performance, its self-developed MetaXLink enables 2- to 64-card interconnect topologies, demonstrating strong linearity and stability in intelligent computing clusters. On the software ecosystem front, its independently built MXMACA software stack is compatible with CUDA, the internationally mainstream GPU ecosystem. In commercial applications, the company is developing and pushing for the deployment of 10,000-card clusters, and has already supported full pre-training of 128B MoE large models.

In late July this year, MetaX unveiled its latest Xiyun C600 at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference. The GPU returned from tape-out and successfully powered on in July, is currently undergoing functional testing, and is expected to enter mass production by the end of 2025.

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