# Enflame

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/enflame
> Updated: 2026-06-28
> Categories: AI Companies, AI Hardware, Chinese AI
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), a free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Quote with attribution.

Enflame Technology (Chinese: 燧原科技, romanized Suiyuan) is a Chinese fabless chip company, founded in March 2018 and based in Shanghai, that designs general-purpose AI accelerators for data-center training and inference. It is backed and bought from by [Tencent](/wiki/tencent), which is both its largest shareholder (a stake of about 20 percent) and by far its largest customer (roughly 84 percent of Enflame's 2025 revenue). Enflame's accelerators are built around an in-house architecture it calls the GCU (General-purpose Computing Unit), sold as the CloudBlazer (Yunsui) family of training cards, inference cards, and cluster systems alongside a software stack named TopsRider. It is usually grouped with [Biren](/wiki/biren), [Moore Threads](/wiki/moore_threads), and MetaX as one of the Chinese GPU and AI-accelerator startups positioned as challengers to [NVIDIA](/wiki/nvidia) in China, a cohort that Chinese press calls the "four little dragons" of domestic GPUs. [1][2]

## What is Enflame?

Enflame is a Chinese designer of data-center AI accelerators: chips that speed up the matrix and convolution math behind deep learning, for both training large models and running inference at scale. Its products are general-purpose compute accelerators rather than graphics GPUs, marketed around an in-house GCU architecture and supported by the TopsRider software platform. The company is frequently described as the last of China's "four little dragons" to head for a public listing, and its defining feature is an unusually tight coupling to Tencent, which supplies most of its revenue. By Enflame's own reckoning in its IPO prospectus, its accelerator card and module shipments reached about 38,800 units in 2024, which it estimates at roughly a 1.4 percent share of China's AI accelerator card market. [1][4][2]

## Who founded Enflame and when?

Enflame was founded in March 2018 by two former [AMD](/wiki/amd) engineers: Zhao Lidong (also rendered Lidong Zhao), who became chief executive and who had led AMD's global GPU product development, and Zhang Yalin (Arthur Zhang), who became chief operating officer. The company is registered in Shanghai. [3][1]

Tencent has backed Enflame since its earliest rounds, alongside the venture firm ZhenFund, and the startup raised a US$100 million Series B in its first year. Over time the shareholder base widened to include the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (the "Big Fund"), the photo-app company Meitu, Primavera Capital, and CITIC-affiliated investors. By the time Enflame filed to go public, Tencent was its single largest shareholder with a stake of roughly 20 percent (the prospectus reports 20.26 percent). [1][3][4]

The Tencent relationship runs deeper than equity. Tencent deploys Enflame's accelerators in its own data centers, and in Enflame's IPO prospectus, sales to Tencent and related parties accounted for 71.84 percent of revenue in the first nine months of 2025. For full-year 2025, reporting on the prospectus put Tencent's share of revenue at about 84 percent, up from around 38 percent a year earlier. That makes Enflame in effect a captive supplier to its largest shareholder, a concentration the prospectus itself flags as a risk and expects to persist for some time. [4][5][2]

## What is the GCU architecture?

Enflame's chips are general-purpose accelerators rather than graphics GPUs, and the company markets the underlying design as the GCU, or General-purpose Computing Unit. The compute silicon itself carries the internal name DTU, for Deep Thinking Unit (邃思 in Chinese). A GCU core is organized hierarchically: the first-generation DTU grouped 32 scalable processors into four clusters and combined tensor, vector, and scalar units, with an on-chip interconnect for multi-card scaling. The architecture targets the matrix multiply (GEMM) and convolutional workloads common in deep learning, and it supports mixed-precision math including FP32, FP16, BF16, and INT8. [6][7]

## What chips does Enflame make?

Enflame's first product, announced in December 2019, was the CloudBlazer T10 (Chinese: Yunsui T10) built on the first-generation DTU 1.0 chip, fabricated on GlobalFoundries' 12LP FinFET process with 2.5D packaging and HBM2 memory. The DTU 1.0 used a PCIe Gen4 x16 interface and proprietary chip-to-chip links for clustering. [8][6]

The second generation, branded Suisi 2.0 (DTU 2.0), arrived in 2021 and powered the CloudBlazer T20 card and the T21 OAM module. Enflame's published figures put the second-generation training chip at about 20 teraflops of FP32 and 80 teraflops of FP16 or BF16, with two HBM2 stacks delivering 512 GB/s of bandwidth; the T21 followed the Open Compute Project's OAM form factor. Later in 2021 Enflame split out a dedicated inference line with the CloudBlazer i20, based on the Suixi 2.5 chip with an updated GCU-CARE core, GlobalFoundries 12nm fabrication, and 16 GB of HBM2e rated at up to 819 GB/s. [7][9]

Enflame's third generation centered on the S60 inference accelerator, launched in 2024. By company and press accounts it became the most widely deployed domestic alternative of its class, with more than 70,000 cards shipped and roughly 100,000 cards in orders, and it anchored what was described as China's first 10,000-card domestic inference cluster, built in Qingyang, Gansu province, under the country's "east data, west compute" program. In July 2025, at the World AI Conference in Shanghai, Enflame unveiled a fourth-generation part, the L600 (邃思L600), positioned as a single chip for both training and inference. The company says the L600 carries 144 GB of on-package memory and 3.6 TB/s of bandwidth and supports FP8. As with most Chinese accelerators, these are vendor figures and have not been independently benchmarked. [10][11]

| Product | Chip | Year | Role | Process | Memory | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CloudBlazer T10 | DTU 1.0 | 2019 | Training | GlobalFoundries 12LP | HBM2 | First product; 32 cores, 2.5D packaging [8] |
| CloudBlazer T20 / T21 | Suisi 2.0 (DTU 2.0) | 2021 | Training | 12nm FinFET | HBM2, 512 GB/s | ~20 TFLOPS FP32, ~80 TFLOPS FP16/BF16; T21 is OAM/OCP [7] |
| CloudBlazer i20 | Suixi 2.5 | 2021 | Inference | GlobalFoundries 12nm | 16 GB HBM2e, 819 GB/s | GCU-CARE core; PyTorch/TensorFlow/ONNX support [9] |
| CloudBlazer S60 | third generation | 2024 | Inference | TSMC N6 | N/A | ~70,000 units shipped; Gansu 10,000-card cluster [10][11] |
| L600 | 邃思L600 | 2025 | Training and inference | N/A | 144 GB, 3.6 TB/s | FP8; vendor specs, announced at WAIC [11] |

## What software does Enflame provide?

Enflame ships a software platform called TopsRider that sits between its hardware and mainstream AI frameworks. It provides drivers, libraries, and a compiler toolchain, and supports TensorFlow, PyTorch, and the ONNX model format, with C++ and Python interfaces. The company has repeatedly credited TopsRider optimization for performance gains across chip generations, and the platform handles virtualization, multi-tenant isolation, and the cluster management used to scale many cards together. A capable software layer is widely regarded as the harder half of competing with NVIDIA, whose [CUDA](/wiki/cuda) ecosystem is the default for AI developers. [7][9]

## Is Enflame on the US Entity List?

No. Enflame's standing under US export controls is frequently misstated, so the distinction matters. Unlike Biren and Moore Threads, which were added to the US Commerce Department's Entity List in October 2023, and unlike [Cambricon](/wiki/cambricon), Enflame has not been placed on the Entity List, and as of mid-2026 there is no public indication that it has been added. As one industry account put it, Enflame "is not on the U.S. trade blacklist, so has access to TSMC." That status is significant because it left Enflame able, in principle, to keep using foreign foundries. To stay within the rules, Enflame submitted downgraded chip designs to TSMC in late 2023 so that the parts would fall below the thresholds of the advanced-computing export rules introduced that year. [12][1]

The arrangement drew scrutiny in 2025. The analysis firm TechInsights reported that Enflame's S60 accelerator contained silicon manufactured by TSMC on a 6nm-class process (die marking SCORPIO-AO, process node identified as N6NTO-HPC), and questioned whether the chip's capabilities crossed the controlled threshold. TSMC contested that classification, saying the part did not meet the criteria for a controlled AI chip, and TechInsights described its analysis as ongoing. Reporting at the time, citing a senior Commerce Department official, noted that Enflame had not received an export license in 2023, 2024, or 2025. The episode illustrates the gray zone many Chinese designers operate in: not formally blacklisted, but dependent on foundry access that the controls are meant to limit. [13][12]

## What is the status of Enflame's IPO?

In August 2024 Enflame disclosed that it intended to list on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market and had engaged China International Capital Corporation (CICC) to handle the required pre-IPO tutoring. A pre-IPO funding round in June 2025 valued the company at about RMB 20.5 billion (roughly US$2.8 billion), up sharply from the roughly US$1.65 billion at which Pitchbook had pegged it in September 2023. The Shanghai exchange accepted Enflame's listing application on 22 January 2026, with the company seeking to raise about RMB 6 billion (roughly US$888 million) to fund development of its fifth- and sixth-generation chips. The application moved into the inquiry stage on 12 February 2026, and on 15 June 2026 the exchange's listing committee approved the IPO, clearing the final regulatory step before a STAR Market debut. [14][5][2]

The prospectus shows a company growing fast and losing money. Revenue rose from RMB 90.1 million in 2022 to RMB 301.2 million in 2023 and RMB 722.4 million in 2024, and reached about RMB 990 million (roughly US$146 million) for full-year 2025. Net losses remained heavy, including about RMB 1.51 billion in 2024 and RMB 887.8 million for the first nine months of 2025, with cumulative losses over three years near RMB 4.29 billion. The filing also discloses steep customer concentration beyond Tencent: the top five customers made up 96.41 percent of revenue in the first nine months of 2025. Enflame's accelerator card and module shipments reached about 38,800 units in 2024, which it estimates at roughly a 1.4 percent share of China's AI accelerator card market. [4][5][2]

## How does Enflame compare with its competitors?

Enflame sits in a crowded field of Chinese accelerator makers that expanded quickly as US controls cut into NVIDIA's China sales. Its closest peers in the "four little dragons" framing are Biren, Moore Threads, and MetaX (Muxi), most of which moved to list on Chinese exchanges in 2025 and early 2026: Moore Threads debuted on the STAR Market in December 2025, and MetaX's application was accepted in mid-2025. The larger competitive picture in China also includes Huawei's [Ascend](/wiki/huawei_ascend) line, which holds a far bigger share of domestic AI compute than any of the startups, and Cambricon, an earlier-listed designer. Enflame's particular profile within this group is its tight coupling to Tencent: that relationship gives it a guaranteed buyer and a path to scale that its rivals lack, while making it unusually exposed to a single customer. [2][15][5]

## References

1. Enflame, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enflame
2. "Enflame IPO: the last of China's four AI chip dragons," The Next Web. https://thenextweb.com/news/enflame-ipo-china-ai-chip-dragons-tencent
3. "China's Nvidia wannabe, Tencent-backed AI chip start-up EnFlame, flags IPO intention," South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3276213/chinas-nvidia-wannabe-tencent-backed-ai-chip-start-enflame-flags-ipo-intention
4. "Enflame's STAR Market IPO Accepted," Pandaily. https://pandaily.com/enflame-s-star-market-ipo-accepted-signaling-strong-momentum-in-china-s-ai-chip-sector
5. "Inside Enflame's Captive Supplier Model: Tencent's $2.8B Chip IPO Bet," HelloChinaTech. https://hellochinatech.com/p/enflame-tencent-captive-supplier
6. "Enflame DTU 1.0 AI Compute Chip at Hot Chips 33," ServeTheHome. https://www.servethehome.com/enflame-dtu-1-0-ai-compute-chip-at-hot-chips-33/
7. "The AI Training Chip Tencent Has an Eye On," The Next Platform. https://www.nextplatform.com/2021/08/26/the-ai-training-chip-tencent-has-an-eye-on/
8. "Enflame Technology Announces CloudBlazer with DTU Chip on GLOBALFOUNDRIES 12LP FinFET Platform for Data Center Training," GlobalFoundries. https://investors.gf.com/news-releases/news-release-details/enflame-technology-announces-cloudblazer-dtu-chip
9. "Enflame has released a new AI accelerator Cloudblazer Yunsui i20," Oceanpine Capital. https://oceanpine.com/news/20220118451.html
10. "China's Silicon Vanguard: Ranking China's Domestic Chip Leaders," Machine Yearning. https://www.machineyearning.io/p/chinas-silicon-vanguard
11. "Chinese AI Chip Unicorns Enflame, MetaX Unveil Next-Gen Chips Shortly After NVIDIA's H20 Return," TrendForce. https://www.trendforce.com/news/2025/07/29/news-chinese-ai-chip-unicorns-enflame-metax-unveil-next-gen-chips-shortly-after-nvidias-h20-return/
12. "China chip startups race to replace Nvidia amid U.S. export bans," Rest of World. https://restofworld.org/2025/china-chip-startups-nvidia-us-export/
13. "Enflame S60 AI Accelerator Processor Floorplan Analysis," TechInsights. https://www.techinsights.com/blog/enflame-s60-ai-accelerator-processor-floorplan-analysis
14. "Will Chinese AI chip designer Enflame's Shanghai IPO be another blockbuster?" South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/3343336/will-chinese-ai-chip-designer-enflames-shanghai-ipo-be-another-blockbuster
15. "'Four Dragons of Domestic GPU' Enflame CN STAR Mkt IPO Accepted w/ Plans to Raise ~RMB6B," AASTOCKS. http://www.aastocks.com/en/stocks/news/aafn-con/NOW.1498173/ipo-news/AAFN
16. "China's GPU unicorn Enflame Technology gains STAR Market IPO approval," Global Times. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202606/1363631.shtml