Moore Threads: Small fry big cheese
With Nvidia’s share price about 10% off its highs in October, anybody worrying that the heat might be sneaking out of the AI bubble will have been heartened to see the fire generated by Moore Threads’ IPO.
Despite being a distinctly second-tier domestic chipmaker with a track record of heavy losses in its five years of existence, Moore Threads has picked up the flattering nickname of “China’s Nvidia”, and when it listed on the Shanghai stock exchange, its share promptly rocketed up by about 500%.
Its shareholder list includes ByteDance, Sequoia Capital and Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, China’s budget rival to ChatGPT. Its GPUs are less advanced and less efficient than those manufactured in China by Huawei and Cambricon, let alone the cutting-edge chips that the US administration has stopped Nvidia from exporting to China. Nvidia’s market share in China is expected to drop from 40% in 2025 to a mere 8% next year, and the big question is who is going to fill that appealingly lucrative gap.
Washington’s argument is that restricting China’s access to high-end technology will slow its progress in areas that are critical to national security, such as military artificial intelligence, mass surveillance and cyber operations. This is a clear short-term gain, but in the long term it will intensify Beijing’s drive for self-reliance, creating a vast, protected market for local chipmakers.
The danger is that when Beijing decides to do something, it sticks overwhelming resources behind a project and gets it done. As has become remarkably clear in the EV market, China has the ability to close gaps and catch up rapidly.
InterGlobe Aviation: Cockpit cock-up
Over the past 20 years, InterGlobe’s airline IndiGo has grown to dominate the domestic market in India, with a market share of around two-thirds, operating about 2,700 flights a day and carrying more than 31.9-million passengers in the fourth quarter of 2025. It keeps costs under control by operating a single type of aircraft, the Airbus A320 family, and sweats them hard, aiming for 20-minute turnaround times to ensure the aircraft are in the air for 12 hours a day.
Operating a schedule like this involves a spectacular quantity of moving parts and when things start to go wrong, as they did last week, they can spiral out of control at some speed.
The catalyst for the chaos was the introduction of revised flight duty time limitations, which increased weekly rest periods for pilots from 36 hours to 48 and reduced the number of night landings. Critics were quick to point out that these new regulations were announced nearly two years ago, yet IndiGo appears to have been woefully underprepared for their impact.
A shortage of cockpit crew meant IndiGo was cancelling about 200 flights a day until it became clear that this was only scratching the surface of the problem, and last Friday it cancelled more than half its flights to attempt a total reboot of its systems and schedules.
This will clearly cause enormous reputational issues. With millions of grumpy customers stranded all over the subcontinent, InterGlobe Aviation’s share price was down 8.8% in the week, and the mess is likely to take a good while to sort out.
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