MiniMax's revenue nearly quadrupled to $116.6 million in the first half of 2026, but its losses grew even faster. That's the price of trying to prove China's AI labs can turn usage into a real business.
If you want proof that AI can generate real revenue and not just real losses, look at what MiniMax told investors on August 26. Revenue jumped hard. The Shanghai-based lab said revenue for the six months through June hit $116.6 million, up 283.1% from $30.4 million a year earlier. That number alone beats the $79 million MiniMax made in all of 2025. MiniMax was founded in December 2021 by Yan Junjie, a former SenseTime vice president and vice-head of its research institute, along with Yang Bin and Zhou Yucong. Alibaba, Tencent, miHoYo, Sequoia China, Hillhouse and IDG Capital all backed the company before it listed. Yan, now 36, controls about 72% of the voting rights through MiniMax's weighted voting structure, according to its listing prospectus.
Enterprise demand did the heavy lifting, not chatbot subscriptions. Revenue from MiniMax's Open Platform and other AI services jumped 703.1% year over year, from $9.2 million to $73.9 million, and now makes up 63.4% of everything the company sells. Its AI-native products, including Hailuo AI and other consumer tools, grew more slowly, up 100.9% to $42.6 million.
Gross profit rose more than fivefold, to $20.8 million. Margins climbed from 12.1% to 17.9%. Still thin. Moving the right way.
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Here's the catch. MiniMax's adjusted net loss widened from $138.7 million to $293 million, a jump of 111.2%, even as the total reported loss narrowed 11% to $358 million. Growth this fast isn't free. Running low-cost models at scale means paying for inference, engineering and sales long before every token turns into profit.
The growth hasn't been fast enough, either. According to the South China Morning Post, analysts had penciled in roughly $363.77 million in full-year 2026 revenue for MiniMax, based on Bloomberg estimates. Six months in, the company has banked about 32% of that.
The competition isn't slowing down #
Alibaba's Qwen and Z.ai's GLM family are fighting for the same enterprise and developer wallets MiniMax needs. The newest entrant, an anonymous model called Ox Alpha that Z.ai later confirmed as a GLM variant, topped OpenRouter's leaderboard this month after handling huge developer demand and drawing attention for coding and agentic work.
DeepSeek doesn't publish revenue at all. Alibaba folds whatever its Qwen models bring in into a much larger cloud division and doesn't break the number out on its own. Z.ai, formerly Zhipu AI, listed in Hong Kong on January 8, a day before MiniMax, after raising about $552 million at a valuation near $6.6 billion, according to Reuters Breakingviews. MiniMax is different. It's one of the few pure AI labs forced to open its books every six months, because it's a public company now.
Compare that to Silicon Valley. OpenAI and Anthropic have raised enormous sums, and xAI raised $20 billion in January to keep expanding its compute buildout. In China, at least one lab now has to prove, twice a year, in public filings, that the business underneath the models actually works.
That transparency came at a price. Investors were happy to pay it, at least at first. MiniMax raised roughly $619 million in its Hong Kong debut on January 9, and Bloomberg reported that shares more than doubled on the first day of trading. TechNode said the surge briefly pushed MiniMax's market value above $11.5 billion. Investors bet early that MiniMax would out-monetize its rivals. This week's numbers are the first real test of that bet, and the honest answer is: partly.
The second half has to work harder #
MiniMax still needs roughly $247 million in second-half revenue to hit the number analysts already expected. That's more than double what it made in the first half. Whether its enterprise pitch can close that gap, or whether MiniMax ends up treating AI like a loss leader for something bigger, is the question its next earnings report will actually answer.
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The company does have cash. MiniMax said it had $1.32 billion on hand as of June 30, up from $1.05 billion at the end of 2025. That gives it room to keep spending. It doesn't give investors patience forever.
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