Welcome to the Halftime Show.

I've been in Shenzhen long enough to know the feeling. You read something. A number, a product announcement, a market debut - and your first instinct is to check whether you misread it. Then you realise you didn't. Then you realise nobody around you seems to have noticed.

That gap is why I started this newsletter.

Every week, I call halftime on one major play from the fastest innovation economy on earth that feeds your perspective as a founder, operator, investor, or simply curious.

One big play. 5 scout style pulls. A mouthwatering stat to keep you warm at night. All through the POV of someone who has built unicorns and startups that failed on either side of the globe. 

Merry Christmas from the fastest game on earth.

Let's lock in.

A GPU startup nobody outside China had heard of just had the biggest tech IPO debut of 2025. Saw bids worth $4.54 Trillion, higher than Nvidia Market Cap.

Then ANOTHA one listed three days later.

Moore Threads. Beijing. December 5th. Up 468% on debut. Three days later, Muxi Semiconductor. Same exchange. Up 692%. Both on the US Entity List. Both unprofitable (unshocking).

Both now valued above $40 billion.

→ Moore Threads got regulatory approval in 88 days: the fastest STAR Market IPO of 2025. Muxi followed three days later at 692%. Coordinated capital formation for an industry that didn't exist five years ago. (Bloomberg)

→ DeepSeek's founder personally backed Moore Threads before the IPO. The man who built China's most consequential AI model this year bet on the hardware it runs on. Software and silicon, aligned by the same hand. (Entrepreneurloop)

→ Bernstein forecasts domestic chips will hold 55% of China's AI chip market by 2027: up from 17% in 2023. Nvidia still commanded ~66% of China's AI accelerator market in 2024. The export controls designed to lock in that position are producing the opposite outcome. (Serrari Group)

→ 8/10 best selling EV models globally are now Chinese. XPeng has L3 permits, topped Germany's NPS rankings, and is entering the UK, Australia, and South Korea in 2026. The domestic battle is won. The international one is just starting. (Gizmochina)

→ China entered the global top 10 innovation index for the first time - and leads the world in innovation clusters. Per the WIPO 2025 Global Innovation Index, China hosts 24 of the world's top 100 innovation clusters, leading all countries for three consecutive years. (CGTN)

This is a capital formation event for China’s entire AI hardware stack.

Moore Threads filed its IPO and got regulatory approval in 88 days - the fastest of any STAR Market listing in 2025. Let’s read that speed as a policy signal. The government wants domestic capital in domestic chips. NOW.

The founder profile tells you everything. James Zhang spent 14 years at Nvidia running China operations before leaving to build the alternative. His team brought enough institutional knowledge to skip a decade of trial and error.

The numbers back it up:

Three days after Moore Threads, Muxi listed at 692%. Same founding year and engineering lineage. Both oversubscribed by thousands. This is coordinated capital formation: an entire industry being built in public, at a speed that policy made possible.

The EV sector ran this saaaame playbook. State policy created the runway. Domestic capital funded the build. Competition drove quality up. The survivors became globally formidable. China's AI chip sector is about five years behind that curve.

We bet this week's IPOs are the starting gun.