(March 31): Zhipu’s shares surged as much as 35% in Hong Kong on Wednesday, showing that investors remained upbeat about the company’s agentic AI prospects despite widening losses in 2025.
CEO Zhang Peng said he expects “exponential growth” for his cloud-based models business, revealing his company is benchmarking against Anthropic PBC on commercialisation during a post-earnings call with reporters on Tuesday.
Zhipu’s shares rose their most since late February, despite reporting a 60% surge in net losses. Revenue more than doubled but just missed analysts’ average projections. That caps a meteoric ascent that took its market value past some of China’s biggest tech incumbents including Baidu Inc.
The Beijing-based company sells cloud-based access to its models and helps clients — typically state-owned enterprises — build customised AI solutions. It’s also among a raft of Chinese AI upstarts and cloud service providers launching their own iterations of the OpenClaw agentic framework, hoping to capitalise on the consumer frenzy to drive compute usage. Zhipu drew 400,000 subscribers to its OpenClaw service plan within 20 days of going live in March.
JP Morgan analyst Olivia Xu noted that demand for Zhipu’s service continues to accelerate while its token price increased by 83% year-to-date, a sign that the company’s growth is driven by its competitiveness as its customers are paying for quality and reliability.
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The Chinese AI firm’s revenue climbed to 724.3 million yuan last year, missing an average analyst estimate of 756 million yuan. Net loss for the same period expanded to 4.7 billion yuan while analysts were expecting only 3.76 billion yuan.
The results are the first for the firm, officially known as Knowledge Atlas Technology JSC Ltd, since it raised US$558 million in its Hong Kong initial public offering at the start of the year.
The growing losses underscored the hyper-competitive nature of China’s AI arena, where newcomers like Zhipu vie with incumbents like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd for customers, talent and computing resources — often triggering price wars.
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Rival MiniMax Group Inc — which went public in Hong Kong one day after Zhipu — earlier reported a 159% surge in its revenue for 2025 to US$79 million, as losses also widened. Shares of the twin AI model makers have more than quintupled since their debuts, surpassing Chinese internet heavyweights like Baidu and Kuaishou Technology in market capitalisation.
Zhipu last month released its latest flagship large language model, GLM-5, designed to improve coding and long-form agentic tasks. The model was designed to support domestic chips for inference, including Huawei Technologies Co’s Ascend processors.
The company is planning a second listing in Shanghai’s Star Market and has hired Guotai Haitong Securities Co and China International Capital Corp to advise on the float, according to a February filing.
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