On July 9th, Zhipu (02513.HK), one of China’s top large model companies, dropped a major announcement on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. They’re planning a new H-share placement under their general mandate. If fully subscribed, this placement is expected to rake in a whopping 31.41 billion HKD. After deducting transaction commissions and intermediary fees, the net raise comes in at around 31.375 billion HKD. This isn’t just a big number—it sets a new record for the largest single placement by a Hong Kong tech firm this year, and marks the biggest post-IPO equity financing in China’s large model sector.
The board believes that bringing in this extra capital through the placement will seriously beef up the company’s financial muscle. It’s all about fueling the ongoing race in foundational model R&D, pushing tech innovation, driving commercial adoption, and building out a stronger ecosystem.
According to the announcement, Zhipu signed an exclusive placement agency agreement before the trading session kicked off that day. The agent is authorized to use bookbuilding to bring in at least six compliant institutional subscribers to pick up the new shares.
The cap for this placement is set at 19.78 million new H-shares, with the price locked at 1,588 HKD per share. Compare that to the closing price of 1,825 HKD on July 8th, and you’re looking at a discount of about 12.99%—which sits comfortably within the normal discount range for Hong Kong tech placements.
Once this placement is wrapped up, the dilution for existing shareholders will be around 4.2%. That’s a very manageable level, meaning the impact on current shareholders’ equity is pretty limited. CICC is stepping in as the exclusive overall coordinator and placement agent for this transaction.
When the morning session opened on July 9th, Zhipu’s stock immediately shot up. As of NUPIAO’s press time, the surge had topped 16%, with shares trading at 2,118 HKD.
Zhipu landed on the HKEX back in January, making it the first domestic general-purpose large model company to hit the Hong Kong market. With an IPO price of 116.2 HKD, the stock has skyrocketed by nearly 1,500% over the past six months, turning it into one of those rare thousand-dollar tech stocks in Hong Kong.
July 8th marked exactly six months since the IPO, meaning the lock-up period for the first batch of cornerstone investors had expired. Usually, “unlocking” spells a liquidity stress test for the market, but Zhipu’s stock defied the odds and stayed strong. During the morning session on July 8th, the stock quickly spiked, hitting an intraday high of a 15% jump. It eventually closed at 1,834 HKD per share, up 0.49%, bringing its total market cap to a massive 81.7676 billion HKD.
Right before the lock-up expired, nearly 70% of the unlocking cornerstone shareholders publicly pledged to hold long-term instead of selling off. This massively eased market fears of a dump and created a rock-solid valuation environment for such a huge placement. The institutions making this pledge span from national strategic capital and local government industry guidance funds to large state-owned enterprise funds and market-driven professional investment firms.
Market insiders are reading this as a strategic move by Zhipu. Picking the six-month post-IPO cornerstone unlock window to execute this placement shows they’ve carefully weighed the broader capital market landscape against their own funding needs.
So, where is this massive pile of cash going? The board made it crystal clear in the announcement: the core resources will keep tilting heavily toward R&D for foundational large models. They also noted that as of June 30, 2026, over 93% of the net proceeds from the global offering had already been deployed. According to the prospectus, this money was primarily used to fuel the company’s set development strategy and business expansion. As their business picks up speed, the pace of spending under the original fundraising plan has naturally accelerated too.
Zhipu’s placement is part of a broader financing wave sweeping through Hong Kong’s tech stocks. Multiple Chinese AI and semiconductor companies are aggressively tapping the HK market for funds, reflecting just how strong investor appetite for the Chinese tech sector is right now.
Right now, China’s large model industry is still in that heavy-scale investment phase. Looking at Zhipu’s 2025 full-year numbers, they pulled in 7.24 billion RMB in revenue but posted a net loss of 47.18 billion RMB. Hitting profitability in the short term is tough, so they rely on continuous, massive capital expenditure backed by external equity financing to keep the engines running.
Industry institutions generally agree that the global AGI space is locked in an intense capital arms race. Overseas heavyweights like OpenAI and Anthropic keep closing billion-dollar funding rounds, and domestic top-tier large model players need to keep injecting cash to stay ahead of the curve. Landing this massive placement gives Zhipu a deep financial war chest to jump into the global AI tech race, helping to narrow the gap in R&D spending for foundational models between China and the rest of the world.
On June 17th, Zhipu rolled out and open-sourced its new flagship large model, GLM-5.2, which boasts a 1M lossless context length and seriously boosted coding skills. Zhipu tells us that on Code Arena, a front-end dev evaluation system where over a million global users participated in blind testing, GLM-5.2 ranked first among all available models worldwide. At the same time, GLM-5.2‘s online inference runs on multiple domestic computing platforms. They completed Day 0 inference adaptation with domestic platforms like Huawei Ascend, T-Head, Moore Threads, Cambricon, Kunlunxin, MXIC, Hygon, and Biren. Once the Ascend 950 super node hits the market in the second half of the year, it’s expected to become a powerhouse computing base for GLM-5.2.
On June 22nd, Zhipu’s intraday market cap as a Hong Kong large-model concept stock smashed through the 1 trillion HKD mark.
JPMorgan recently bumped Zhipu’s target price up from 1,800 HKD to 2,000 HKD, keeping their “Overweight” rating. Their research report points out that the newly launched GLM-5.2 is globally competitive. Its open-weight strategy is poised to leverage external infrastructure—like cloud providers, inference platforms, and enterprise private deployments—to scale up model usage, forging a growth loop of “wider distribution -> larger usage scale -> stronger paid conversion.”
Zhipu is also polishing off its A+H dual capital market layout, with the company’s A-share IPO tutoring process completely wrapped up.
On July 7th, Zhipu issued a statement clarifying some noise in the market. They noticed reports claiming the company had withdrawn its counseling filing for the proposed A-share IPO. Zhipu called these claims flat-out false, stating the described events simply don’t match reality and look like malicious hype. The company clarified that the proposed A-share issuance plan was already reviewed and approved by shareholders at the 2025 annual shareholders’ meeting held on June 22, 2026. Plus, according to the CSRC’s official website, the counseling work for the proposed A-share issuance is already done. The company will drop further announcements when it’s time.
