Zhipu's Hong Kong public offering was oversubscribed by more than a thousand times, with an issue price of HK$116.20, and will be listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange tomorrow.

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On the evening of January 7, Zhipu AI announced its offer price and allocation results on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The Hong Kong public offering was oversubscribed by 1,159.46 times, and the international offering by 15.28 times; the offer price was HK$116.20, raising a net amount of HK$4.1734 billion. Zhipu’s performance in Hong Kong pre-market trading today was outstanding, at one point rising nearly 38% to HK$160.

Zhipu will begin trading on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on January 8, becoming the world’s first listed company on the global capital market with general artificial intelligence (AGI) foundational model as its core business.

As early as April 2025, Zhipu had started the process for an A-share listing with the Beijing branch of the China Securities Regulatory Commission. However, as of December 12, the company had not received further opinions or inquiries from the CSRC regarding its A-share listing. Against this backdrop, Zhipu chose to turn to the Hong Kong market, seeking more sustainable funding for the high-investment, long-cycle race in large models.

GLM Technology System Supports Commercialization Path

Zhipu AI was founded in 2019 as a technology transformation enterprise of Tsinghua University's Department of Computer Science. The company mainly provides services ranging from computing power, API interfaces, to MaaS (Model as a Service), supporting both local and cloud deployment models and serving industries such as financial services, internet, smart devices, and healthcare. Centered on GLM, it covers text, multimodal, and application-oriented model services.

GLM is based on the large model modeling paradigm belonging to Transformer, realizing unified modeling of understanding and generation tasks by combining autoregressive generation with masked prediction language. In 2021, Zhipu released China’s first high-precision pre-trained large model framework GLM, and launched a commercial platform for product development as model-as-a-service. In 2022, GLM-130B was launched and open-sourced; in January 2024, GLM-4 was released; GLM-4.5 was open-sourced in July; GLM-4.6 in September; and in December, the latest flagship model GLM-4.7 was introduced.

Since 2021, Zhipu has been developing the MaaS business model. The platform mainly provides four core model capabilities: language models, multimodal models, agent models, and code models.

Continuous Losses Test Market Confidence

Data shows that from 2022 to the first half of 2025, Zhipu AI’s revenue has been increasing rapidly, but cumulative net losses have reached as high as 6.2 billion yuan in the same period. In 2022, 2023, 2024, and the first half of 2025, Zhipu lost 144 million yuan, 788 million yuan, 2.958 billion yuan, and 2.358 billion yuan respectively. Even after excluding non-operating factors such as changes in the fair value of preferred shares, its adjusted net losses remain quite substantial.

Zhipu AI faces two major structural challenges behind its significant losses: the sharp decline in cloud business profitability and continued major investment in R&D. Its cloud deployment business gross margin plunged from 76.1% in 2022 to -0.4% in the first half of 2025, with core business falling into price wars or cost pressure.

At the same time, the company persists in the strategy of “exchanging losses for technology,” with cumulative R&D investment reaching 4.4 billion yuan over the past three and a half years, and R&D expenses in 2024 exceeding seven times that year’s revenue, thereby building a technological moat but continuously draining cash flow.

Therefore, this Hong Kong listing is not just a fundraising move, but also a public stress test of its commercialization capability and market confidence. Zhipu must prove to the market that its technological moat can eventually be converted into a sustainable profitable path.

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