The Zhipu AI logo will appear on your smartphone screen.
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Stocks in Chinese artificial intelligence companies Knowledge Atlas Technology JSCThe company, known as Zhipu, soared as much as 35% on Wednesday after reporting strong revenue growth in its first earnings report.
The Beijing-based company later pared its gains, but was still up about 30% in afternoon trading. Zhipu, which went public in Hong Kong in January after a $558 million initial public offering, is the first major pure AI modeling company in China, and perhaps the world, to go public.
Shibaura said in an earnings report on Tuesday that sales in 2025 rose about 132% from a year earlier to 724 million yuan, but the figure fell short of the average forecast of 760 million yuan by analysts polled by Reuters.
The company reported an adjusted net loss of 3.18 billion yuan, an increase of 29.1% year-on-year due to increased research and development spending.
Founded in 2019 by researchers at Tsinghua University, Zhipu recently released its latest GLM-5 model, which it said rivals its American rivals in several key performance metrics.
Zhipu, which has strong backing from the Chinese government, is considered one of China’s so-called “AI Tigers” (startups building large-scale language models comparable to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic), making it a strong barometer for China’s AI sector as a whole.
Zhipu AI CEO Zhang Peng reportedly said in an earnings conference that the company is accelerating its use of domestic chips in line with the Chinese government’s push to develop China’s domestic semiconductor industry to meet the significant increase in computing demand since February.
The CEO’s comments were notable because the company’s ability to train AI models has previously been limited by U.S. export controls, limiting its access to advanced semiconductor technology and expertise.
Zhipu was also placed on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List in January last year due to its alleged ties to the Chinese military.
Shares in Zhipu’s Chinese AI rival MiniMax, which also went public in Hong Kong in January, rose about 16% in Wednesday trading.
