China's quant funds just crossed $474 billion in assets, and investors are throwing money at AI-driven strategies faster than firms can open the doors.
In May, Ubiquant opened a new fund and closed it in under two hours after raising 2.6 billion yuan, about $384 million, according to Bloomberg. Days later, investors snapped up more than 100 million yuan of a product from Shenzhen ChengQi Asset Management within seconds. Neither event was a fluke. China's quantitative fund industry ended 2025 managing 3.22 trillion yuan, roughly $474 billion, more than any other emerging market and closing the gap on quant ecosystems in the US and Europe that took decades to build.
That scale looked unthinkable two years ago. By the end of 2024, AUM across China's quant industry had shrunk to about 1.13 trillion yuan, down from 1.92 trillion in 2023 and 1.5 trillion in 2022, after regulators cracked down on high-frequency trading practices they blamed for stoking market swings. The rebound since has been driven less by a change in rules than by a change in tools. More than 60% of China's quant funds are now running some form of AI or machine learning in their strategies, and the returns have pulled money back in fast.
No firm captures that shift better than High-Flyer. The Zhejiang-based quant fund, controlled by DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, returned nearly 57% in 2025 while managing more than 70 billion yuan, about $13 billion, according to data compiled by the Shenzhen consultancy PaiPaiWang Investment & Management. Liang built High-Flyer's AI infrastructure years before DeepSeek existed. As early as 2019, the firm spent over 100 million yuan on a supercomputer it called Firefly One, then followed in 2021 with roughly 1 billion yuan for 10,000 Nvidia A100 chips to build Firefly Two. That hardware became the backbone DeepSeek trained on.
The relationship now runs both directions. In June, DeepSeek closed its first outside funding round, raising 51 billion yuan, about $7.5 billion, at a valuation near 400 billion yuan, or $58.9 billion. Liang himself put in 20 billion yuan, making him the round's largest investor. He is, at once, the man who built a leading AI lab and the man running one of the funds proving that AI actually works as a trading edge, not just a research project.
The rest of the field is scaling just as fast. By April, 71 China-based quant managers had crossed 10 billion yuan in AUM, up from 61 in March, with 11 new entrants joining in that single month, according to industry data reported by Caixin Global. China's overall private fund industry hit a record 23.5 trillion yuan, about $3.5 trillion, by the end of April, with quant managers accounting for a growing share of that total.
Minghong Investment sits at the top of that list, with 80 billion to 90 billion yuan under management and the broadest strategy lineup in the country, spanning index enhancement, market neutral, CTA and macro multi-strategy products. It was founded by Qiu Huiming, a physics PhD from the University of Pennsylvania who previously worked at Millennium Management in the US. Even Minghong isn't immune to the volatility AI-driven markets can produce. Its macro product lost roughly 15% in a two-week stretch in March, a reminder that faster models don't mean smaller drawdowns.
Frankly, a market can't mint 11 new billion-yuan quant managers in a single month without the trade getting crowded. When dozens of AI-enhanced funds hunt the same short-term inefficiencies in the same pool of A-shares, the edge each one captures shrinks. That's the tension sitting underneath the headline number. China built in about eighteen months what took Renaissance Technologies and Two Sigma decades to build in the US, and it built it with the same AI tools now competing against each other for the same trades.
Whether the next 71 managers reach the 10 billion yuan mark at the same pace, or find the well running dry as returns compress, is the question China's quant industry hasn't had to answer yet.
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