A report by Bloomberg revealed that China is redirecting its $28 trillion stock and bond markets toward funding its technology competition with the United States. Memory chipmaker CXMT Corp.’s record Shanghai debut has been a prominent example of this strategy.
According to media reports, this is a departure from Beijing’s usual reliance on subsidies, tax incentives, and state investment to build strategic industries. Chinese tech companies have, over the past couple of years, brought in roughly $217 billion by tapping equity and debt markets. American contributors have outpaced them by a ratio greater than six to one. Amazon and Alphabet have been the largest contributors to the gap.
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CXMT is China’s largest memory chipmaker and was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR Market for technology companies on the 27th of last month. The company raised $9.8 billion — the second-largest public offering ever on mainland Chinese exchanges. The debut closing price surged 466% on the first day of trading. Analysts say the successful debut was backed by strong government support, including the introduction of an IPO fast track. CXMT was the first company to clear a “pilot preliminary review” system that lets firms resolve key issues with regulators before a formal IPO.
According to a Quartz report, the strategy comes with risk. CXMT stock is trading at a premium to global memory peers, with policy-driven sentiment and limited share availability playing a larger role than fundamentals, according to Gary Tan, a portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments. Since China routinely sets IPO prices conservatively to protect retail buyers from early losses, CXMT walked away with less capital than it might have otherwise commanded, putting it at a disadvantage relative to well-funded foreign memory rivals.
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Quartz also mentioned that more listings are on the way. AI firms Z.AI and MiniMax are pursuing mainland listings after their Hong Kong debuts. Moonshot — which recently got a lot of attention for Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model designed for software engineering and autonomous task execution — told investors it is preparing to go public within six months. DeepSeek has begun laying groundwork for its own IPO.
“In China, if that doesn’t come from the state, the capital ultimately has to come from the market,” said Hong Hao, chief investment officer at Lotus Asset Management.