Moore Threads: A Thrilling, ‘Gravity-Defying’ Valuation Experiment

After Moore Threads, the “first Chinese-made GPU company,” debuted on the STAR Market, its stock price surged past 900 yuan on the fifth day of trading, making it the third-highest-priced stock on the A-share market, after Kweichow Moutai and Cambricon. The closing market capitalization exceeded 440 billion yuan, marking a 56% increase from its listing day and only 140 billion yuan short of Cambricon’s latest market value. On December 5th, Moore Threads’ stock price skyrocketed more than fourfold on its listing day, reaching a market cap of 282.3 billion yuan. The highest profits for retail investors from a single subscription approached 280,000 yuan. This explosive rise in value starkly contrasts with the overall market sentiment, which has remained weak, with value investors facing shrinking portfolios and becoming increasingly speechless.Moore Threads’ capital frenzy has not only been a celebration for the stock itself but has also become a typical example of the drastic shift in market logic, posing a new challenge to A-share value investors. The “peculiar” valuation of Moore Threads lies in the fact that even when estimated for the first three quarters of 2025, with a revenue of 785 million yuan, its current price-to-sales ratio is nearly 300 times. This level of valuation puts Moore Threads far ahead of domestic competitors: Haiguang Information, with a more mature business and proven profitability, has a price-to-sales ratio of around 41 times, while Cambricon, which also focuses on AI chips and has already started making a profit, stands at a price-to-sales ratio of around 99 times. This means the market is paying more than seven times the price for each yuan of Moore Threads’ current revenue compared to Haiguang Information. When compared to global GPU leader Nvidia, which typically maintains a price-to-sales ratio of 30-40 times during its performance boom, the discrepancy becomes even more striking.

The market clearly knows that Moore Threads is “expensive,” but it still chooses to vote with real money. To sustain such a “gravity-defying” valuation experiment, a complex logic that goes beyond short-term financial reports is needed. Unlike Haiguang Information (focused on CPU + DCU) and Cambricon (NPU), which specialize in a single computing domain, Moore Threads champions the “all-functional GPU” concept. This means its product line spans AI computing, graphics rendering, and scientific computing. Against the backdrop of geopolitical factors limiting high-end GPU imports, this technology, which offers “complete substitution,” has been imbued with high strategic scarcity value.Apart from its absolute valuation, the company’s performance growth is undeniably rapid, with revenue surging from 46 million yuan in 2022 to 785 million yuan in the first three quarters of 2025—especially with the first half of 2025 already reaching 702 million yuan, surpassing the full-year revenue of 2024. However, the company still posted a loss of 724 million yuan in the first three quarters of 2025, and accumulated losses of nearly 5 billion yuan from 2022 to 2024. Zhang Jianzhong, the founder and CEO of Moore Threads, previously served as the global vice president of Nvidia for 15 years. Many of the core team members also hail from Nvidia, which undoubtedly lends credibility to the company’s technology roadmap. From its founding to listing, Moore Threads took only five years, backed by over 80 institutions that collectively invested nearly 9.5 billion yuan. This includes top-tier market-oriented institutions like Sequoia Capital China and Tencent, along with strong industrial resources from state-owned capital like Shenzhen Capital Group and Guosheng Capital, as well as industry giants like China Mobile and Meituan.

Moreover, Moore Threads’ IPO on the STAR Market also attracted ten strategic investors, who subscribed to 14 million shares, accounting for 20% of the total issuance, further supporting the stock price.However, any gravity-defying experiment must ultimately face the test of gravity. Moore Threads’ current market value has clearly pre-priced extremely optimistic expectations, placing the company in a position where it must overcome multiple challenges. The greatest challenge remains commercialization. Despite rapid revenue growth, the company has an extremely high customer concentration, with its top five customers accounting for over 80% of sales, which typically means the company’s revenue is heavily reliant on a few large customers. Furthermore, Moore Threads’ main revenue source is high-performance AI computing clusters for training and inference, while Nvidia has built a formidable moat through its CUDA ecosystem. While Moore Threads has launched migration tools, building a mature, developer-attracting independent ecosystem requires sustained investment and time accumulation over a decade. According to Moore Threads’ first-round inquiry response in its IPO, in the domestic AI chip market for 2024, Nvidia (all-functional GPU), Huawei HiSilicon (ASIC), and AMD (GPGPU) hold market shares of 54.4%, 21.4%, and 15.3%, respectively. Moore Threads has less than a 1% share of the domestic GPU market.In fact, looking at the history of A-shares, the lesson from “listing at the peak” is not far behind. In July 2020, Cambricon went public with a price-to-sales ratio of nearly 300 times, only to experience years of valuation digestion and stock price stagnation until OpenAI’s rise and Cambricon’s gradual performance improvement reignited its upward momentum. Some analysts estimate that, with 10-12 billion yuan in revenue expected for 2025 and a price-to-sales ratio of about 90 times for Cambricon, Moore Threads’ fair market value should be around 100 billion yuan.

Its current market cap of over 400 billion yuan may have already priced in the optimistic growth expected for 2027, when the company is forecast to reach a revenue of nearly 6 billion yuan. If Moore Threads’ future performance growth or technical milestones fall short of expectations, the pressure for a valuation correction will be inevitable.Looking at the broader market, Moore Threads’ rise has become a phenomenon, signaling a rapid evolution of pricing paradigms in the capital market. Against the backdrop of the national strategy of technological self-reliance, the rise of Moore Threads is not a coincidence. Behind the “pricing for dreams” is the capital market’s new mission to support technological innovation, and the STAR Market’s fifth set of standards embodies this mission. These standards allow unprofitable hard-tech companies to go public and raise funds, offering exit channels for venture capital and promoting a positive cycle of “investment-listing-exit-reinvestment.”On the flip side, traditional value investors face an awkward situation: the core factors driving pricing have temporarily shifted from judgments about a company’s current profitability (PE) and asset value (PB) to evaluations of future strategic positioning, scarcity, and market dominance. This is a complex model that integrates national will, industrial security, technological breakthrough probability, and long-term market space, full of uncertainties and difficult to precisely calculate using traditional formulas. For Moore Threads itself, the outcome of this valuation experiment may ultimately hinge on one simple question: will the company be able to turn its astonishing market value into equivalent levels of technological leadership, ecosystem influence, and commercial dominance in the next few years?