Zhipu AI launches $560m Hong Kong IPO as LLM race goes public

Zhipu AI going out at roughly US$6.6 billion in Hong Kong is a milestone for the Chinese model ecosystem and for public‑market exposure to frontier LLMs. Until now, most serious foundation‑model plays — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, even many Chinese peers — have stayed private or inside big tech parents. Zhipu is effectively offering public investors a direct lever on AGI‑adjacent research and MaaS economics, with 70% of proceeds reportedly earmarked for model development and training infrastructure.([scmp.com](https://www.scmp.com/business/investor-relations/ipo-quote-profile/article/3338107/chinas-zhipu-ai-launches-us560-million-share-sale-hong-kongs-ipo-tech-race-heats))

It also signals that Hong Kong wants to be more than a downstream fintech hub: regulators are clearly comfortable listing a company whose core assets are large‑scale models, data and compute, at a time when the U.S. is still digesting AI‑chip and export controls. From a race‑to‑AGI perspective, this listing gives Zhipu fresh capital to chase larger parameter counts, better reasoning and more verticalized models in competition with Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and rising outfits like MiniMax and DeepSeek.([reuters.com](https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/six-china-ipos-debut-hong-kong-after-raising-900-mln-cap-banner-year-2025-12-30/)) If public markets reward Zhipu’s growth, it will strengthen the case for other model labs to IPO, diversifying funding beyond sovereign wealth and hyperscaler cheques and potentially accelerating the overall Chinese AGI effort.