What makes Yuanjie – a Chinese optical chip star and Hong Kong IPO candidate – stand out?

Many companies have capitalised on China’s AI infrastructure build-out.

Photo: AFP Yuanjie Semiconductor Technology, a Chinese maker of laser chips for optical communications, has emerged as one of the mainland exchanges’ biggest beneficiaries of the artificial intelligence infrastructure boom – with its shares rising nearly ninefold over the past year as it pursues a Hong Kong listing.

The Shaanxi-based integrated device manufacturer, whose shares closed at 1,100 yuan on Friday, now ranks second by share price among mainland-listed companies, trailing only Kweichow Moutai at 1,416 yuan.

Yuanjie’s market capitalisation stands at about 94.6 billion yuan (US$13.7 billion).

It is only the second company on Shanghai’s tech-focused STAR market to breach the 1,000 yuan threshold, after AI chipmaker Cambricon.

Founded in 2013 by Zhang Xingang, a Tsinghua University graduate who later earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Southern California, Yuanjie listed on the STAR Market in 2022.

Zhang, a veteran of the optical communications industry, previously worked at Luminent and Source Photonics before establishing the company.

Yuanjie’s core products are laser chips – the optical heart of high-speed data transmission – spanning continuous wave lasers, electro-absorption modulated lasers (EML) and distributed feedback lasers.

These serve AI data centres, 5G infrastructure and fibre access networks, powering transceiver modules that convert electrical signals into pulses of light across fibre cables.

Yuanjie’s core products serve AI data centres.

Photo: Xinhua By external sales revenue in 2025, Yuanjie ranked as the sixth-largest laser chip provider globally and the second-largest supplier of laser chips for silicon photonics-based high-speed optical interconnect products worldwide, according to data from China Insights Consultancy cited in the company’s Hong Kong stock exchange filing on Wednesday.

Yuanjie has rapidly capitalised on the AI infrastructure build-out.

Full-year 2025 revenue, released last week, rose 138.5 per cent to 601.4 million yuan, while net profit attributable to shareholders reached 191 million yuan – a sharp reversal from a 6.1 million yuan loss a year earlier.

The turnaround was driven largely by its data centre business.

Overall gross margin expanded 32.3 percentage points to 55.7 per cent in 2025, with data centre products reaching a gross margin of 71.3 per cent.

For the first time, data centre revenues

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