Zhipu AI first Chinese LLM firm to briefly hit HK$1 trillion valuation

Chinese artificial intelligence developer Zhipu AI crossed the HK$1 trillion ($127 billion) market valuation mark on Monday, becoming China’s first large language model company to reach a HK$1 trillion valuation at one point.

The momentum also underscores growing investor confidence in China's homegrown large language model developers.

Zhipu AI's shares jumped more than 42 percent during trading on Monday, lifting its market capitalization to about HK$1.1 trillion ($140.3 billion) at its peak, which placed it in the same valuation tier as China’s most valuable names, including optical components supplier Zhongji Innolight.

Zhipu’s rally has been driven by optimism around its latest open-source large language model, GLM-5.2, which was released last Tuesday. The model is designed for long-duration, autonomous task execution rather than simple prompt-response interaction.

According to company-released benchmarks, GLM-5.2 ranks among the best open-source models globally and narrows the performance gap with leading proprietary systems such as Anthropic’s Claude Opus to within roughly 1 percent to 4 percent on evaluations including FrontierSWE and Terminal-Bench. It also ranked first among publicly available models on CodeArena programming benchmarks.

The momentum spilled over to shares of AI peer MiniMax, which also rose sharply on Monday, reflecting renewed investor appetite for China's foundation model developers.

The rally comes amid broader signs of improving investor sentiment toward China's AI sector. DeepSeek recently completed a $7.4 billion first funding round, while China's securities regulator expanded eligibility for its STAR Market's fifth listing standard to include AI companies, potentially opening new financing channels for technology firms that have yet to turn a profit.