Dubai Weekly
Chinese AI supply-chain listings in Hong Kong are still pricing well even as CoreWeave's bond troubles rattle the American side of the trade. Citi says the difference comes down to who's actually buying. Hong Kong has hosted 118 IPOs in the first nine months of 2026, raising HK$388 billion, or roughly $49.4 billion, a jump of 106% from the same stretch last year, according to a Reuters report.
Simon Yuen, Citi's head of China investment banking, told Reuters that the Chinese AI supply-chain listings behind that surge are holding their valuations even as US data center stocks get hit by the kind of debt-market jitters that knocked CoreWeave down 15% in a single session this month. The contrast is the story. In the US, CoreWeave's 2031 bonds were trading around 79 cents on the dollar with yields near 16% as of mid-October, a sign that credit investors are pricing real doubt into a company carrying roughly $52 billion in debt and lease obligations to fund its data center buildout.
Nebius, Applied Digital and Iren all slid alongside it. Across the Pacific, Shanghai Biren Technology, a GPU developer that listed in Hong Kong on January 2 at HK$19.6 a share, was still trading around HK$37 to HK$38 in early October, roughly double its issue price, even after a sharp pullback from its 52-week high of HK$70.75 tied to a fresh HK$4 billion share placement. Yuen's explanation is about who holds the paper, not just what the paper says.
Chinese companies listing in Hong Kong are drawing a roughly even split between domestic and international demand, he told Reuters, with southbound flows, mainland money buying into Hong Kong-listed shares through the trading link, acting as a buyer of last resort that American listings simply don't have. That's a structural difference, not a sentiment one. When US funds get nervous about the AI trade, a Hong Kong IPO still has a deep pool of mainland capital willing to step in.
Kunlunxin, Baidu's AI chip unit, is pursuing a dual listing on Shanghai's STAR Market and in Hong Kong, reportedly targeting a $50 billion valuation, a roughly seventeen-fold jump from where it stood six months earlier, according to TrendForce. MiniMax has filed confidentially for its own Hong Kong IPO, aiming for a valuation north of $4 billion before year-end. Kiwimoore, a chip designer, is reportedly eyeing a $2 billion valuation for its own Hong Kong debut.
None of this reads like a market second-guessing itself. Yuen isn't claiming the two markets are decoupled, though, and that distinction matters. He told Reuters plainly that if the broader AI cycle turns in the US, Hong Kong will feel it too.
What he's describing isn't immunity, it's a cushion, a market structure that absorbs a shock from across the Pacific instead of transmitting it immediately. That's a meaningfully different claim than "China has solved the AI bubble question," and it's worth being precise about which one is actually true. There's also a shift coming in what these listings are for.
Yuen expects next year's Hong Kong pipeline to move away from pure hardware; and toward AI model developers and application companies. That's a tell. If the smart money driving these deals thought hardware valuations still had room to run indefinitely, you wouldn't expect the advisors structuring the pipeline to be quietly rotating the next wave toward software.
None of this means Chinese chip valuations are cheap or that the underlying demand numbers are fully proven out. Biren's stock has still lost more than half its value from its 2026 high, and the company has gone back to the market for fresh capital three times since its IPO, raising more than HK$17 billion in equity financing this year alone, according to reporting from iTiger. A company that keeps needing to place new shares is a company that's still burning cash faster than it's generating it, winning IPO or not.
What Citi is really describing is two different risk architectures sitting under the same AI infrastructure boom. The US version runs on corporate debt and bond-market confidence, and when that confidence cracks, as it did for CoreWeave this month, the stock reprices in days. The Hong Kong version runs more on equity and a captive buyer base willing to keep showing up.
Both are bets on the same underlying thing, that AI compute demand keeps growing fast enough to justify the money already committed. Only one of them has a credit market watching every quarter to check the math. Also read: Monzo turns down Nubank and now shops a stake to CVC and Advent • Zcash is up over 1,000% this year and institutions are openly behind it • Gold and silver tumble as the year's biggest rally hits a wall This article is posted in Financial Markets News , check it out for more related stories.
Source: Startup Fortune
