Lightelligence jumps nearly 400% in Hong Kong IPO

Lightelligence’s shares rose nearly 400% in their Hong Kong IPO debut, opening at HK$880 against an offer price of HK$183.2. The Shanghai-based photonics chipmaker raised HK$2.4 billion (about US$310 million). The retail tranche was oversubscribed about 5,785 times and early trading briefly put the company’s market value near US$10 billion.

Lightelligence develops optical interconnects and optical computing. Optical interconnect replaces electrical wiring with light to move data between chips inside servers and across server clusters. Optical computing processes information using photons. The company describes its flagship product, LightSphere X, as a distributed optical circuit-switching solution for GPU supernode interconnects and reports it can raise model FLOPS utilization by more than 50% and lower total cost of ownership for compute workloads.

The company reported revenue of RMB 38 million (about US$5.6 million) in 2023, RMB 60 million (US$8.8 million) in 2024 and RMB 106 million (US$15.5 million) in 2025, a compound annual growth rate of 66.9%. Net losses widened to RMB 1.34 billion in 2025. The asset-liability ratio was 473% at the end of 2025, and one customer accounted for about 40.6% of revenue that year.

By the end of 2025 Lightelligence had 44 commercial customers supporting GPU clusters with several thousand cards. The company held 410 patents as of March 2026, more than half of which it says apply to both optical interconnect and optical computing.

Industry analysis identified Lightelligence as the first company to achieve commercial-scale deployment of optoelectronic hybrid computing. In China’s single-node optical interconnect market the firm ranked first among independent providers by revenue in 2025 with an 88.3% share of that supplier segment, while Huawei held a 98.4% share of the overall market. Anchor investors in the IPO included Alibaba, GIC, Temasek, BlackRock, Fidelity International, Schroders, Hillhouse Capital, Lenovo and ZTE.

A 2017 Nature Photonics paper by co-founder Yichen Shen proposed using light for deep learning computation; the company says it grew from that research. Market forecasts project the global AI computing and interconnect market will grow at about a 27% compound annual rate through 2031. The listing provides Lightelligence with a public market valuation and access to public funding.