Reporter | Song Jianan
On May 29th, the AI heavyweight on the Hong Kong stock exchange, Zhipu AI (02513.HK), staged a jaw-dropping rally, surging over 23% intraday. It hit a high of HK$1,993, briefly pushing its market cap past HK$881 billion—comfortably overtaking Xiaomi (around HK$722 billion), Baidu (around HK$355 billion), and JD.com (around HK$308 billion). That’s a huge leap into the top tier of Chinese tech companies, and Zhipu managed to pull it off in less than five months.
As of this writing, though, the stock has cooled off significantly. It’s sliding 4.14% to trade at HK$1,551 per share, giving it a market cap of HK$691.5 billion, putting Xiaomi back in the lead. For context, another big-name AI model company on the Hong Kong market, Minimax, is trading at HK$850 (up 1.55%) with a market cap of HK$266.6 billion—less than half of Zhipu’s.
Zhipu hit the market on January 8th at an IPO price of HK$116.2, raising about HK$4.3 billion. It barely saw a dip on day one before rocketing higher. Just 43 days after listing, the stock had already soared to HK$725—a gain of over 500%—pushing its market cap past HK$320 billion and overtaking names like Trip.com, Kuaishou, and JD.com. Then on April 1st, it surged another 32%, hitting HK$938 intraday and breaking through the HK$400 billion market cap mark.
The momentum has only accelerated in May, with the stock tacking on over 125% for the month so far. In total, Zhipu has surged an eye-watering 12.9 times since its listing.
What’s really interesting is the ripple effect from overseas. On May 28th, AI firm Anthropic announced it had closed a massive $65 billion Series H funding round, giving it a post-money valuation of $965 billion—surpassing OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation and making it the highest-valued AI startup in the world. That news sent a jolt through the Hong Kong AI sector, and Zhipu, being the “first stock of China’s large language models,” clearly rode the wave.
On the money front, Hang Seng Indexes just dropped the news that Zhipu will be added to the Hang Seng Tech Index starting June 8th, with an initial weight of about 0.53%. That’s expected to trigger a flood of passive fund inflows—around $1.25 to $1.75 billion USD. Plus, it’s likely to fast-track Zhipu into the Stock Connect program, unlocking another HK$51 billion to HK$92 billion in southbound capital.
Here’s the kicker: the Hong Kong market is starving for pure-play AI large model stocks. Zhipu is basically the only game in town right now, making it a magnet for southbound money and institutional heavyweights. Add to that the fact that its free float is tiny (less than 3% of shares are in circulation), and you have a recipe for a stock that can make huge moves on relatively modest volume.
Zhipu isn’t just riding the hype wave—they’re backing it up with tech. They recently launched the GLM-5.1-highspeed API for enterprise clients, which cranks out 400 tokens per second. That’s perfect for latency-sensitive stuff like AI coding, real-time chat, business decisions, and voice apps. They also dropped the ZCube next-gen inference architecture, which delivers a 15% boost in inference throughput while cutting hardware costs by 33%.
On the business side, Zhipu is taking a bold stance against the brutal price wars sweeping the industry. While rivals like DeepSeek and Xiaomi are slashing prices permanently, Zhipu actually *raised* its API pricing by 83% in Q1. And guess what? Demand still outstripped supply! Call volume jumped 400%. As a result, Zhipu now ranks among the top firms in the country for paid Token consumption.
Their latest earnings tell the story: 2025 revenue came in at RMB 724 million, up 131.9% year-over-year. The MaaS platform hit RMB 1.7 billion in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), exploding 60x over the last 12 months. Gross margins also improved dramatically, jumping from 3% in 2024 to 19%. Their core business is now cash-flow breakeven, with losses only coming from R&D on next-gen models.
The report also highlighted that the GLM Coding Plan launched last year has already attracted over 242,000 paying developers. After the GLM-5 launch, heavyweights like ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent signed on within 24 hours. Nine out of China’s top 10 internet companies have now deeply integrated GLM. As of March 2026, the platform had over 4 million registered users. Zhipu’s coding, agent, and enterprise LLM services now cover 218 countries and regions globally.
The analyst community is pretty bullish overall. JPMorgan kept its “Overweight” rating and bumped its price target up to HK$950 from HK$800. In a recent note, they pointed out that Zhipu’s API platform is seeing both volume and price rise simultaneously—a rare sight in the middle of a brutal price war. They see this as direct proof that Zhipu has built real pricing power in high-value areas like coding and intelligent agents.
China Merchants Securities International also chimed in with an “Overweight” rating, noting that Zhipu’s breakthrough in inference efficiency is further brightening its commercial outlook. They are currently reviewing their price target.
Huachuang Securities initiated coverage on May 27th with a “Buy” rating. They believe Zhipu is well-positioned to ride the wave of AI generalization and the agent boom. They project revenue of RMB 3.02 billion in 2026, RMB 7.108 billion in 2027, and RMB 12.278 billion in 2028, representing YoY growth of 316.9%, 135.4%, and 72.7% respectively.
Looking at the bigger picture, analysts see a clear generational shift in valuation logic here. The traditional tech giants like Xiaomi, Baidu, and JD.com have core businesses that are mature and slowing down, dragging down their valuations. Zhipu, on the other hand, is right on the cusp of the AGI explosion. As an AI infrastructure player, its penetration potential is massive. Add in the tech moat, pricing power, and pure scarcity on the Hong Kong exchange, and you’ve got a textbook growth stock premium.
