China's MetaX AI Chip Faces Lock-Up Expiry Test After Moore Threads Wipes 49B Yuan

The Quick Take

• MetaX Integrated Circuits faces 14 million shares released from lock-up Thursday, expected to trigger selling pressure
• Moore Threads' similar lock-up expiry last week sparked a selloff that wiped nearly 49 billion yuan in market cap
• Chinese AI chip sector faces a critical test as multiple lock-up expirations coincide with market volatility

The expiry of MetaX's 14-million-share lock-up period arrives at an already fragile moment for Chinese AI chip stocks. The Moore Threads precedent from the prior week — a 49 billion yuan market cap wipe — provides a concrete template for what concentrated selling pressure from restricted shareholders can do to thinly traded AI chip names. MetaX Integrated Circuits has been positioned as a key domestic alternative to NVIDIA GPUs under China's semiconductor self-sufficiency drive, which means its valuation carries substantial policy premium that technical selling can rapidly deflate.

The broader implications for China's AI chip sector go beyond individual name volatility. Both MetaX and Moore Threads are part of a government-backed effort to develop competitive GPU-class hardware for training and inference workloads, operating under the shadow of U.S. export controls on advanced chips. Investor confidence in this sector was built partly on scarcity premium (no NVIDIA competition in China) and partly on subsidized demand from Chinese AI labs. A wave of lock-up selling tests whether fundamental buyers exist at current valuations or whether the political tailwind is the primary support.

Watch MetaX's share price trajectory in the days following Thursday's lock-up expiry — the speed of recovery (or further decline) relative to Moore Threads' post-expiry pattern will tell investors whether institutional bottom-fishing has developed in the Chinese AI chip space. Longer term, the key variables are China's AI capex cycle (Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba chip procurement plans) and whether MetaX can demonstrate comparable performance to restricted NVIDIA products in commercial deployments.

Synthesized from 1 source.