Chinese memory chip maker CXMT briefly became China’s most valuable publicly traded company just two hours after its Shanghai Stock Exchange debut, as investors pushed its shares more than 466% above their IPO price.
The surge lifted the company’s market capitalization to an estimated $547 billion, overtaking Tencent and placing CXMT among the world’s 25 most valuable listed companies. The rally reflects growing investor enthusiasm for memory-chip makers, whose products have become increasingly critical to AI infrastructure.
While the valuation stunned markets, the bigger question is whether demand for AI memory chips can sustain such extraordinary expectations over the long term.
CXMT set its IPO price at RMB 8.66, but debuted on the exchange at RMB 49.50 amid huge demand from both retail and institutional investors. The share price peaked at RMB 54.65 before falling back to RMB 49 by the end of trading, according to reporting by The Financial Times.
The huge spike in value is another clear sign of the demand for chip stocks. CXMT is the fourth-largest manufacturer of memory chips in the world and the only Chinese company among the top four, giving it preferential access to the domestic market.
Although CXMT remains far behind Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron in terms of global market share, its position has steadily improved since 2020. According to IDC and Morningstar, its share has grown from less than 2% in 2020 to 10% in 2026.
Its technological progress has also been rapid, particularly in the DRAM market, the type of memory being deployed in data centers powering AI models and services. With the US-China trade conflict escalating, CXMT may be positioned to become the only domestic supplier of high-speed memory to the Chinese data center market, which would be a highly lucrative position.
Memory market on fire at the moment
The memory market appears to be facing an even greater demand-supply imbalance than GPUs and AI accelerators, with the main manufacturers raising prices heavily over the past 18 months. Micron even exited the consumer memory market to focus its efforts on chips for data centers and AI deployment.
This has hit consumer electronics manufacturers hard, with much of the industry forced to raise product prices to make up for higher component costs. Even Apple, which has spent more than a decade using its scale to negotiate favorable pricing, has been forced to raise prices on almost every product outside the iPhone and stop selling some high-memory models because of the supply crunch.
What has been difficult for consumer electronics brands has been highly profitable for memory chip makers. SK Hynix topped $1 trillion in valuation, making it one of the 20 most valuable companies in the world, an extraordinary achievement for a company focused almost entirely on memory chips.
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Will CXMT and others maintain their value?
The main question is whether any of these companies can maintain their current valuations over the long term.
A P/E ratio this high implies investors expect years of exceptional earnings growth, leaving little room for disappointment. CXMT has a price-to-earnings ratio of around 1,600, twice as high as the largest ratios among major Nasdaq companies with meaningful revenues. That looks difficult to sustain unless CXMT can rapidly increase both revenue and profit.
Samsung has several other divisions it can rely on once the memory market begins to cool, but SK Hynix and Micron are both primarily memory chip manufacturers. Both have been setting high prices per unit to make the most of the current boom cycle.
SpaceX followed a similar rapid boom-and-bust cycle on the stock market. It debuted at a valuation of $1.77 trillion and rose as high as $2.5 trillion, briefly making it more valuable than Amazon and turning Elon Musk into a trillionaire for a few hours.
However, the share price declined over the following weeks as the initial investor excitement faded and the market reassessed the company’s fundamentals. SpaceX now sits at around $1.47 trillion, still placing it among the ten largest companies in the world by market cap, but well below its opening peak.
CXMT’s blockbuster debut highlights how central memory chips have become to the AI economy. Whether today’s valuation proves durable will depend on how long the AI infrastructure boom continues—and whether the company can translate surging demand into earnings that eventually catch up with investor expectations.
Related News: China is reportedly considering new export controls on advanced AI models and semiconductor technologies.