Silicon Photonics Supplier Xihe Technology Wins CSRC Approval to Raise 1.83 Billion Yuan on the STAR Market

China's securities regulator has approved the IPO registration of Shanghai Xihe Technology (羲禾科技), an independent silicon photonics integrated chip supplier riding the AI data-center interconnect boom. The China Securities Regulatory Commission disclosed the approval on October 23, just 115 days after the STAR Market filing was accepted on June 30 and ten days after the listing committee signed off — one of the fastest runs through the review pipeline this year. The company plans to issue up to 32.55 million new shares and raise 1.83 billion yuan, roughly 260 million dollars.

Founded in May 2021, Xihe designs high-performance silicon photonics integrated chips that combine optical signals with CMOS manufacturing, spanning 400G, 800G and 1.6T speed classes and extending into 3.2T and 6.4T NPO/CPO transceiver integration. The company has completed single-channel 400G sample development and passed end-customer verification for its 3.2T and 6.4T transceiver-integrated chips. Its chips ship into the supply chains of major international optical module makers and end up in the AI clusters and hyperscale data centers of leading cloud providers in China and abroad.

The financials trace the AI interconnect boom almost literally. Revenue went from 6.23 million yuan in 2023 to 70.95 million yuan in 2024 and 460.91 million yuan in 2025 — a compound growth rate of 760 percent — and hit 569.12 million yuan in the first half of 2026 alone, already above the whole of last year. The company turned profitable in 2025 with net profit of 175.55 million yuan after losses in 2023 and 2024, and booked 161.05 million yuan in the first half of 2026. Chinese media reports cite company guidance of 1.1 to 1.2 billion yuan in revenue for the first nine months of 2026.

Scale has arrived fast. By revenue, Xihe held about 13 percent of the global silicon photonics integrated chip market in 2025, ranking second worldwide according to Frost & Sullivan, and its cumulative shipments passed 12 million chips by August 2026. The market itself is tilting upward: 400G chips made up about 78 percent of a 2.72-billion-yuan market in 2025, with 800G at 12 percent and 1.6T at 4 percent, and Frost & Sullivan projects 1.6T to reach 13.97 billion yuan and more than 38 percent of the market by 2030.

The proceeds map onto that transition. Of the 1.83 billion yuan, about 563.78 million yuan goes to expanding production capacity for AI compute and data-center silicon photonics chips over three years, about 952.30 million yuan funds a five-year program to industrialize next-generation chips including single-channel 400G and multi-channel, high-density NPO/CPO devices, and about 317.78 million yuan builds out a research center.

Prospectus risks read like the standard AI supply chain asterisks. Sales to the top five customers accounted for 100, 98.41, 96.40 and 92.26 percent of revenue across the reporting periods, and a single customer took 60.40 percent in 2025 and 55.55 percent in the first half of 2026. Frequent shifts among large customers are flagged as a structural feature of the business.

The listing is a marker for where the optical layer sits in the AI stack. Xihe notes that chip iteration is accelerating — the jump from 400G to 800G took two years, 1.6T is already in volume production, and 3.2T with NPO and CPO architectures is nearing industrialization. As east-west traffic inside AI clusters keeps compounding, the silicon photonics layer that was a research curiosity a decade ago is becoming the next contested piece of the interconnect supply chain, and Shanghai now has a pure-play listed candidate to bet on.