Ligent Technologies raised HK$5.7 billion, about $727 million, in a Hong Kong initial public offering and jumped as much as 19.2 percent to HK$39.3 a share on its Tuesday debut, giving the company a market value of roughly HK$32.4 billion. The offering sold 172.01 million shares. Ligent makes optical transceivers, the components that convert data into light signals so it can move quickly through the fibre-optic cables linking servers inside AI data centres.
The company is headquartered in San Jose but majority controlled by China’s Hisense Group, which held a 48.6 percent stake going into the listing. That structure, US-facing engineering and branding sitting on top of Chinese industrial ownership, has become common among the hardware suppliers feeding both American and Chinese AI buildouts simultaneously, and Ligent’s IPO prospectus leaned heavily on demand from data centre operators rather than any single flagship customer.
The debut adds Ligent to a run of Hong Kong listings this year built explicitly around AI infrastructure demand rather than AI software or models themselves, following chipmaker Enflame’s oversubscribed Shanghai listing earlier this month. Investors are pricing the unglamorous physical layer, transceivers, cabling, cooling, as a safer way to bet on AI spending than the model companies themselves, whose valuations move on assumptions rather than shipped units.
What the 19 percent pop does not settle is how much of Ligent’s order book is durable data centre demand versus a single buildout cycle that could slow once current AI infrastructure spending plans are fulfilled. Hisense’s controlling stake also means Ligent’s fortunes stay tied to a Chinese parent at a moment when Washington is scrutinising exactly that kind of ownership structure in the semiconductor supply chain.
