Liu Debing, chairman of Knowledge Atlas Technology JSC Ltd, better known as Zhipu, (center), during the company's listing ceremony at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in Hong Kong on January 8, 2026 Photo: VCG

Chinese mainland-based artificial intelligence start-up Zhipu closed 13 percent higher than its IPO price of HK$116.20 ($14.92) on Thursday, the day the company debuted on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. 

Zhipu, which OpenAI publicly identifies as a rival, becomes the first Chinese AI large-language model (LLM) firm to go public, as China's homegrown AI models move from technological exploration to large-scale commercial application, analysts said. 

Zhipu's shares closed at HK$131.50, which translated to a market capitalization of HK$57.89 billion. The company is known as one of China's "AI tigers" as the international AI race is now intensifying. 

In 2025, OpenAI noted Zhipu's significant progress in innovation, naming the company as a competitor standing on the "front line" of China's AI efforts, according to a CNBC report. 

The other "AI tigers" include MiniMax, which is expected to go public in Hong Kong on Friday, and DeepSeek, which rocked Silicon Valley in early 2025 with its ground-breaking LLM at only a fraction of foreign peers' cost. 

Zhipu planned to issue 37,419,500 H-shares, comprising 7,483,900 shares in Hong Kong and 29,935,600 shares in its international offering. The final allocation results revealed that the Hong Kong offering was oversubscribed by 1,159.46 times, while the international offering was oversubscribed by 15.28 times.

According to an internal letter seen by the Global Times, the company's founder Tang Jie announced that Zhipu will launch its new generation of LLM GLM-5 soon. "We believe GLM-5 will enable AI to perform more genuine tasks, through further scaling and brand-new technological improvements," Tang said.

The "true explosion in applications" will come when AI can replace various roles and handle complex tasks, Tang said in the letter. Tang added that what will truly determine the landscape of the next phase of LLMs is not the number of applications or short-term commercial hype, but the more fundamental model architecture and learning paradigms of a LLM.

Wang Peng, an associate researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Thursday that the listing of Zhipu signals that China's homegrown LLM sector is ramping up commercialization. 

"Zhipu's listing will further drive its technological iteration and relevant ecosystem development, thus consolidating Chinese companies' position in the global AI race. The fundraising allows global investors to participate in the fast-track development of China's AI industry," Wang said. 

Shanghai-based MiniMax is scheduled to go public on Friday. The company sets its IPO price at HK$165 per share, with a total offering of 25,389,220 shares, raising approximately HK$4.189 billion. The company said in a statement that it "completed its Hong Kong IPO only four years after its establishment, setting a new global record for the shortest time from founding to listing in the AI industry."

According to data from Futu Securities, MiniMax's IPO recorded a total margin financing amount of more than HK$253.3 billion, with the public offering oversubscribed by 1,209 times.