Alibaba announced on November 10 that it plans to spin off its chip company Pingtouge and list it independently on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
There is a time point hidden in the announcement: Pingtou Ge actually submitted the A1 listing application form in a confidential form as early as September 11. In other words, this matter has been quietly going through the process for two months, and it is only now announced to the outside world after the Hong Kong Stock Exchange confirms that Alibaba can proceed with the spin-off.
The listed entity is Pingtouge (Shanghai) Technology Co., Ltd., which is currently a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alibaba and issues H shares.
There is no announcement on the scale of fundraising. Previous media reports pointed to an IPO in Hong Kong in 2027, raising at least US$2 billion to US$3 billion. If this number really comes to fruition, it will be one of the largest semiconductor IPOs on the Hong Kong stock market in recent years.
Pingtou Ge was founded in 2018 and has made Xuantie series RISC-V processors and Etian server CPUs. In the past two years, the outside world has been most concerned about its AI inference chip. In the context that Nvidia's high-end chips are not available, how much of Alibaba Cloud's own computing power can be supplemented by self-developed chips is directly related to the training and inference costs of large models such as Tongyi Qianwen.
Why should it be separated and listed separately? There are three common explanations. Chip research and development burns money, so independent financing no longer relies solely on the group's blood transfusion; on independent valuation, semiconductor companies usually get higher multiples in the capital market than e-commerce groups; another point is that after independence, it is easier to sell chips to customers other than Alibaba. After all, no cloud manufacturer is willing to buy core computing power from a competitor's subsidiary.
Baidu's Kunlun Core is also taking the path of spin-off and listing. The self-developed AI chips of domestic cloud manufacturers are changing from cost centers to independent stories to tell.
The specific issuance time and valuation will have to wait for the prospectus after the hearing.