On April 28th, Xizhi Technology officially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, opening at HK$880, a 380% surge over its issue price, becoming the world's first listed company specializing in AI optical computing power. Founded in 2017 by MIT PhD Shen Yichen, the company focuses on two main product lines: optical interconnects and optical computing. In 2025, its revenue reached RMB 106 million, a year-on-year increase of 66.9%, but its net loss reached RMB 1.342 billion, with accumulated losses of approximately RMB 2.5 billion over three years, indicating a high degree of customer concentration. In 2025, its market share in China's scale-up optical interconnect solutions reached approximately 88.3%, and its global cumulative shipments of optical computing chips ranked first for two consecutive years. The IPO secured subscriptions from 20 cornerstone investors, including Alibaba, Lenovo, and GIC, with 70% of the funds raised earmarked for R&D. Competition in the global optical interconnect and optical computing sectors is intensifying, with NVIDIA-backed Ayar Labs completing a $500 million funding round and Lightmatter achieving a breakthrough in 1.6Tbps transmission speeds.
Article source: iHeima
On April 28, Xizhi Technology officially listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with the stock code 01879.HK. The opening price was HK$880, a surge of approximately 380% compared to the issue price of HK$183.2. During the day, it reached a high of HK$930, a gain of over 407%, and its total market capitalization once exceeded HK$80 billion.
Founded in 2017 by Yichen Shen, a PhD in Physics from MIT, the company entered the capital market as the "world's first listed AI optical computing power company." During the IPO phase, Xizhi Technology's Hong Kong public offering was oversubscribed by 5784.70 times, and its international offering was oversubscribed by 53.83 times.
The 20 cornerstone investors subscribed for approximately HK$1.644 billion worth of shares, representing 68% of the total offering. The group includes industry giants such as Alibaba, China Mobile Capital, Lenovo, and ZTE, as well as international long-term funds such as GIC, BlackRock, Fidelity International, and Temasek.
Xizhi Technology's main business is optoelectronic hybrid computing, with product lines divided into optical interconnect and optical computing. The optical interconnect business uses optical signals to replace traditional electrical signals to connect computing devices such as GPUs and CPUs, solving the data transmission bottleneck in AI large-scale model training. In 2025, it contributed approximately RMB 83.9 million in revenue, accounting for approximately 79.2%.
The optical computing business uses photons instead of electrons for data processing, and achieved revenue of approximately RMB 22.1 million in 2025, representing a year-on-year increase of 579%. In 2025, Xizhi Technology held a market share of approximately 88.3% in the Chinese independent scale-up optical interconnect solution market. The company ranked first in global cumulative shipments of optical computing chips for two consecutive years.
Behind the high growth lies a continuously expanding loss.
From 2023 to 2025, Xizhi Technology's revenue was RMB 38 million, RMB 60 million, and RMB 106 million, respectively, with a compound annual growth rate of 66.9%. However, its net losses during the same period were RMB 413 million, RMB 735 million, and RMB 1.342 billion, respectively, accumulating to a total loss of approximately RMB 2.5 billion over the three years. R&D investment accounted for a staggering 450.4% of revenue. Furthermore, in 2025, the top five customers contributed 78.9% of the revenue, indicating a high customer concentration and raising questions about its resilience.
The IPO of Helio Labs is not an isolated case; the global optical interconnect and optical computing sector is rapidly heating up. In March of this year, Ayar Labs, a US-based optical interconnect chip company jointly backed by NVIDIA and AMD, completed a $500 million Series E funding round, raising its valuation to approximately $3.8 billion, bringing its total funding to $870 million.
Another US photonics computing company, Lightmatter, announced in March this year that it had achieved a CPO chip sample with a single-fiber transmission speed of 1.6Tbps, and reached a similar milestone in cooperation with Qualcomm, while also engaging in technical cooperation with chip design tool manufacturer Cadence.
While several international competitors lack the publicly listed status of companies like Xizhi Technology, they have also established solid foundations in both optical interconnect and optical computing. Ayar Labs focuses more on chip-level optical interconnects for data transmission, while Lightmatter's photonic computing solution emphasizes its low-latency advantage in AI inference scenarios.
Optical computing has broad commercial prospects.
Xizhi Technology founder Shen Yichen believes that the direction of optical interconnection is highly clear and the industry consensus has been basically reached; although optical computing is in the early stages of commercialization, once a breakthrough is achieved, the potential is even greater.
Xizhi Technology plans to use about 70% of the funds raised in its IPO for R&D investment over the next five years, with about 35% allocated to optical interconnect business and about 35% to optical computing business.
In terms of optical interconnects, the commercial version of the Optical Leap Super Node 128, launched in 2026, reduces transmission latency by more than 90% compared to traditional electrical switching in large model training. Currently, three optical interconnect 1,000-card GPU clusters have been deployed.
In the field of optical computing, the penetration rate of optical computing chips in China's AI inference chip market is currently less than 0.5%, but it is expected to reach 20% by 2040.
While market expectations are optimistic, the challenges are equally real. Xizhi Technology has yet to achieve profitability and it is unlikely to turn a profit in the short term. It remains uncertain whether the commercialization pace of optical computing products can keep up with capital expectations.
In the global optical interconnect and optical computing race, Xizhi Technology, as the "first stock," has secured its capital entry ticket. Whether it can strike a balance between technology implementation and commercial returns will test more than just product capabilities. After all, in a race aimed at "leapfrogging" competitors, who can truly establish a closed-loop commercialization model is perhaps more worthy of attention than who goes public first.
