Shares in China’s leading memory chip maker soared about 470 percent on its first day of trading on 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 initial public offering this year, which two weeks ago valued the company at more than $85 billion.
After trading opened on the Shanghai stock exchange, investors catapulted its valuation to more than $485 billion. That is well ahead of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the previous biggest company, which is valued at about $385 billion.
Trading in CXMT shares opened at 49.50 renminbi, up from its I.P.O. price of 8.66 renminbi.
The stellar trading start follows global volatility and a recent sell-off in tech stocks. Investors have questioned the stratospheric valuations of Silicon Valley companies that are investing massively to pursue the development of artificial intelligence.
CXMT, a decade-old company little-known outside its homeland, is a linchpin in China’s drive to nurture homegrown suppliers to reduce its dependence on foreign companies in the race for A.I. leadership. And it is an ascendant Chinese chip maker at a time of increasing tension between the United States and China, and anxiety in America that China is catching up fast.
The global race to dominate A.I. has generated a boom in demand for memory chips, which instantaneously shuttle data to and from the processing engines of computers. All computers rely on memory chips, but the demands of massive A.I. data centers being built in the United States and China are all but limitless. As demand has soared, so have prices.
CXMT’s revenue jumped to nearly $7.5 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up more than 700 percent from the year-earlier period, according to its I.P.O. prospectus. And the company last year posted a profit of more than $1 billion, up from a loss of $2.8 billion in 2023.
CXMT is beginning to make inroads in the global memory market, which is dominated by two South Korean companies, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, and an American company, Micron Technology. CXMT held 8 percent of the global market in the first quarter of 2026, compared with 3 percent a year earlier, according to the tech market research firm Counterpoint Research.
Two weeks ago, SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion by selling American depositary receipts, in the largest share sale on Wall Street by a non-U. S. company.
