At the debut close of 49 yuan, those shares are worth about $5.6bn. Had the stock merely held its 8.66 yuan sale price, the same pledge would have been worth under $1bn.

He also agreed to restrictions on selling his own stock for 10 years. Bloomberg notes that both commitments are unusual in the history of mainland-listed Chinese companies.

The catch, and there are several

Nobody is getting paid soon. The bonus only begins paying out in three years, and payments are then phased across a decade.

CXMT also has not said who qualifies. The prospectus does not specify whether some or all staff benefit, and the company did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comment.

The headcount gives a sense of scale. CXMT had 19,298 employees at the end of 2025. Split evenly, which the company has not said it will be, $5.6bn is roughly $290,000 a head.

That figure is not far off what the competition already pays. Samsung chip workers received an average bonus of about $340,000 this year, and SK Hynix has made comparable payouts.

This is a talent war, not a gift

Chinese founders now have to satisfy the state and hold on to engineers at the same time. The second problem is the one money can solve.

“This is very much a newly emerging phenomenon,” said Meng Shen, director at investment bank Chanson & Co. “Talent retention is definitely a key factor.”

Shen added that no single founder can drive success alone in high-growth tech, and that it takes a large influx of top talent.

The argument is familiar from the other side of the same industry. Jensen Huang recently said companies should pay workers as much as possible. In Korea, the same logic has produced its own problems, from appliance staff rallying over bonuses that went to chip divisions, to warnings that the payouts are an inflation risk.

He has done this before

Zhu has form on symbolic sacrifice. In 2018 he stepped back from GigaDevice Semiconductor, his first successful public venture, to run CXMT in partnership with the Hefei municipal government.

At the time he pledged not to draw a single yuan in salary until the project turned a profit. It was a multibillion-dollar bet on a company with no product.

That bet worked. CXMT is now China's largest maker of DRAM, the memory that feeds server databases and AI workloads, and the fourth largest in the world.

He is also not alone. Yan Junjie of MiniMax has pledged to take no salary until his firm hits an AI milestone, while handing his own shares to long-serving staff.

Who actually owns CXMT

There is a larger shareholder in this story than Zhu, and it is the state.

Before the IPO, the Hefei municipal government held more than 30% through local state vehicles. China's Big Fund II held over 8%. The Big Fund, formally the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, exists to buy the country semiconductor self-sufficiency.

Set against what Zhu and the state made on Monday, $5.6bn is a modest slice. The generosity is real, and it is also affordable.

Whether it happens

A pledge that starts in three years and runs for ten is a long promise. Shen, who called the trend genuinely new, was also the one to say so.

“Whether these promises will actually be fulfilled, and to what extent, depends entirely on how binding the commitments really are,” he said.

He put the founder's side of it more bluntly. “For founders at this stage, wealth eventually becomes nothing more than a number,” he said, adding that it can be a number with negative side effects.

Zhu spent seven years not taking a salary to build this company. He has now committed to a decade of not selling it, and to giving away a share of it beginning three years from now. On Monday the market decided what that share is worth. It picked $5.6bn.