Sawt Falasteen - Chinese chipmaker CXMT soars more than 500% on debut

The race to build data centres that power artificial intelligence has fuelled a major global memory chip shortage and caused business to boom for the companies that produce them.

ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is the world's fourth-largest maker of DRAM memory chips, with nearly eight percent market share.

It wants to rival South Korea's Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, and US giant Micron.

The firm's shares rocketed more than 500 percent by mid-morning, taking its market capitalisation to 3.5 trillion yuan ($520 billion) -- surpassing megabank ICBC as the mainland's most valuable company.

"China is taking its place at the table for the first time, rather than merely being a sideline observer," Zhang Guobin, founder of Chinese specialist website eetrend.com, told AFP.

He called the initial public offering a "turning point in the global storage industry landscape and the development trajectory of China's semiconductor sector".

The country is increasingly counting on homegrown hardware to boost its position in the AI race against the United States.

CXMT, based in the eastern region of Anhui, had raised 66.6 billion yuan ($9.8 billion) in a blockbuster IPO, Bloomberg News reported.

That marked China's biggest ever mainland tech share sale -- beating the 46.3 billion yuan raised by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) in 2020.

Advanced memory chips are in huge global demand for their key role in AI servers, alongside other powerful data-crunching semiconductors made by the likes of Nvidia.

That has created a major shortage of the less flashy DRAM chips used in laptops, phones and other electronics, pushing up prices.

US giant Apple, feeling the pinch of shortages, is reportedly testing CXMT's DRAM chips for use in its products.

CXMT, founded in 2016, is on the Pentagon's list of Chinese companies with alleged military ties, although that does not prohibit US firms from doing deals with them.

It is not the only memory chipmaker whose shares have benefited massively from the AI boom.

This month, SK hynix soared 13 percent on its first day of trading on Wall Street, capping one of the world's biggest ever stock sales.

Its market capitalisation on Seoul's Kospi index soared past $1 trillion in May.

That milestone was also recently hit by Samsung Electronics and US chipmaker Micron -- with AI thrusting the three memory chip firms into a previously exclusive club of around a dozen companies, nearly all American.

B.Khalifa--SF-PST