Zhipu's Hong Kong public offering was subscribed more than 1,000 times, with an offer price of HK$116.20. It was listed on the Hong Kong stock market today.

# Source: Wall Street Insights

By Li Jia

Zhipu AI made its debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on January 8 as the **world’s first publicly traded company focused on general-purpose artificial intelligence large models**, with an offer price of HK$116.20. The Hong Kong public offering was oversubscribed by a staggering 1,159.46 times, and the stock surged nearly 38% at one point in the gray market trading the previous day. The IPO raised approximately HK$4.17 billion in total. Equipped with its self-developed GLM technology system, the company recorded a revenue of RMB 191 million and a net loss of as much as RMB 2.358 billion in the first half of 2025.

In an announcement released on the evening of January 7 regarding its offer price and allocation results, Zhipu AI stated that its Hong Kong public offering was oversubscribed 1,159.46 times, while the international offering saw a 15.28 times oversubscription. With an offer price set at HK$116.20, the net proceeds from the IPO amounted to HK$4.1734 billion. The stock delivered a stellar performance in the Hong Kong gray market the previous day, climbing nearly 38% to HK$160 at one point.

Zhipu AI commenced trading on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on January 8, officially becoming the first listed company in the global capital markets with **general artificial intelligence (AGI) foundation models** as its core business.

As early as April 2025, Zhipu AI had initiated A-share listing tutoring and registration with the Beijing Office of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). However, as of December 12, the company had not received any further opinions or inquiries from the CSRC regarding the advancement of its A-share listing process. Against this backdrop, Zhipu AI opted to switch its listing venue to Hong Kong, seeking more sustainable funding to fuel its participation in the high-investment, long-cycle race of large model development.

## GLM Technology System Underpins Commercialization Path

Founded in 2019, Zhipu AI is a technology spin-off enterprise from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University. The company primarily provides a full-stack of services ranging from computing power and API interfaces to **MaaS (Model-as-a-Service)**, supporting both on-premises and cloud-based deployment models. Its solutions have been implemented across diverse sectors including financial services, internet, smart devices, and healthcare. Centered on the GLM framework, Zhipu AI’s offerings cover text processing, multimodal capabilities, and application-oriented model services.

Based on the Transformer-based large model paradigm, GLM unifies the modeling of both understanding and generation tasks by combining autoregressive generation with masked language modeling. In 2021, Zhipu launched GLM—the first high-precision pre-trained large model framework in China—and introduced a product development and commercialization platform based on the Model-as-a-Service model. The company went on to release and open-source GLM-130B in 2022, followed by GLM-4 in January 2024, GLM-4.5 in July 2024, GLM-4.6 in September 2024, and its latest flagship model GLM-4.7 in December 2024.

Zhipu AI has been laying out its MaaS business model since 2021, with its platform offering four core model capabilities: language models, multimodal models, agent models, and code models.

## Sustained Losses Test Market Confidence

Data shows that although Zhipu AI’s revenue grew rapidly from 2022 to the first half of 2025, its cumulative net loss during the same period soared to an alarming RMB 6.2 billion. Specifically, the company reported net losses of RMB 144 million in 2022, RMB 788 million in 2023, RMB 2.958 billion in 2024, and RMB 2.358 billion in the first half of 2025. Even after excluding non-operating factors such as fair value changes in preferred shares, its adjusted net loss remained extremely high.

Zhipu AI’s massive losses stem primarily from two structural challenges: a sharp decline in the profitability of its cloud-based business and continuous heavy investment in research and development (R&D). The gross profit margin of its cloud deployment business plummeted from a high of 76.1% to a negative 0.4% between 2022 and the first half of 2025, indicating that its core business has been caught in a price war or squeezed by mounting cost pressures.

Meanwhile, adhering to a strategy of **"trading losses for technological breakthroughs"**, the company has poured a total of RMB 4.4 billion into R&D over the past three and a half years. Notably, its R&D expenditure in 2024 exceeded seven times its annual revenue for that year. While this approach has helped Zhipu AI build solid technological barriers, it has also led to a continuous drain on cash flow.

Therefore, this Hong Kong IPO is more than just a financing move—it serves as a **public stress test** of the company’s commercial viability and market confidence. Zhipu AI must demonstrate to the market that its technological moat can ultimately be translated into a sustainable path to profitability.

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