The red-hot Hong Kong initial public offerings (IPOs) of Zhipu AI and MiniMax Group, two of China’s hopefuls to take on US giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, have given a boost to Beijing’s ambitions in the artificial intelligence sector, according to executives and industry watchers.
While Zhipu’s valuation of about US$9 billion and MiniMax’s market cap of US$14 billion remain tiny compared with the US giants – OpenAI is worth about US$500 billion and Anthropic’s valuation is estimated at about US$350 billion – the Chinese start-ups have shown there is investor appetite for domestic AI assets, and that there is potential to turn AI technologies into revenues and profits.
“We see strong demand for AI,” according to a recent report by HSBC analysts Liu Yiran and Zhang Heng, which cited robust revenue growth from Zhipu and MiniMax. “We expect 2026 to be the initial year for Chinese enterprises to gradually shift [their] investment focus from model and compute towards AI applications, and monetisation should accelerate.”
In addition to China’s open-source foundational models, including R1 from DeepSeek and the Qwen family by Alibaba Group Holding, start-ups like Zhipu and MiniMax were turning AI research into saleable products globally with prices at a fraction of their US competitors, industry executives said.
“The most important thing about this IPO is that it serves as a real-world validation of whether our technology can drive successful commercialisation,” said Zhipu’s chairman Liu Debing in a recent interview with Tencent Technology, an online news channel run by the Chinese social media giant.
Zhipu’s coding AI assistant, for instance, is wooing subscribers with a monthly fee of 20 yuan, or about US$3, a fraction of what Anthropic charges for its Claude coder. In an interview with Bloomberg, Liu said the low price advantage would help Zhipu win global users, repeating China’s success formula of offering high-value products at affordable prices.
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