{"slug": "zhipu-stock-soared-1500-percent-while-revenue-stayed-under-105-million", "title": "Zhipu Stock Soared 1,500 Percent While Revenue Stayed Under $105 Million", "summary": "Zhipu, the Chinese AI company behind the GLM models, saw its stock surge nearly 1,500% since its Hong Kong IPO in January, briefly pushing its market cap above $100 billion, despite reporting only $105 million in revenue and a $695 million loss in 2025. The rally, fueled by a thin float and investor optimism about China's AI sector, contrasts sharply with the company's financials, as its API business run rate of $251 million offers the only concrete support for the valuation.", "body_md": "*Zhipu's shares have rallied almost 1,500 percent since its Hong Kong debut in January, but the company behind the GLM models still posted just $105 million in revenue last year against a loss of nearly $700 million.*\n\nZhipu just sold $4 billion worth of its own stock in Hong Kong, and investors couldn't get enough of it. Shares jumped 22 percent the day it priced. That's despite the deal landing at the low end of a range already discounted to the stock's prior close. Six months after its Hong Kong Stock Exchange debut, Zhipu is up almost 1,500 percent, according to Bloomberg. Its market capitalization briefly cleared $100 billion.\n\nThat's a startling number for a company that made $105 million in revenue last year. Zhipu, which now trades as Knowledge Atlas Technology and markets its products abroad as Z.ai, listed on January 8 alongside rival MiniMax, in what several outlets called the first true AI model IPOs anywhere in the world. The Tsinghua University spinoff behind the GLM family of large language models built its reputation on open source releases. It's an open source story, not yet a sales story, and that gap is exactly what makes the last six months so strange.\n\nThe timing of the placement tells you something about how this works. A six month lockup on 25.68 million shares expired around July 7. Zhipu launched the $4 billion sale within 24 hours. It offered 19.8 million shares at HK$1,588 to HK$1,698 each, a discount of up to 13 percent to the prior close, with proceeds earmarked for computing infrastructure and further model development. Even after the new shares, only about 13.5 percent of Zhipu's stock is freely tradable. Bloomberg has flagged it as one of the most volatile large caps in Asia because of that thin float. A small float amplifies every swing, up or down.\n\nHere's the part the rally obscures. Zhipu's 2025 revenue came in at 724.33 million yuan, about $104.8 million, up 131.9 percent from the prior year. That's real growth. It's also nowhere near the billion dollar milestone that has circulated around the company this year. Losses widened faster than revenue. Zhipu lost 4.72 billion yuan, roughly $695 million, up 59.5 percent, as research and development spending climbed 44.9 percent to 3.18 billion yuan. JPMorgan projects 2026 revenue of 4.6 billion yuan, around $668 million. China Merchants Securities puts the figure closer to 3.54 billion yuan, about $513 million. Neither estimate gets Zhipu to a billion dollars this year.\n\nThe one number that does support the excitement sits inside the API business. Zhipu's model as a service platform reached an annualized run rate of 1.7 billion yuan, about $251 million, as of March, a sixtyfold increase from a year earlier, based on the company's own disclosures. That's the figure bulls point to when they argue Zhipu is converting research prestige into paying enterprise customers, not just downloads of an open weight model.\n\nFrankly, the stock price and the income statement are telling two different stories. Only one of them is verifiable. Bloomberg has already pushed back on the comparison investors keep reaching for. Pairing Zhipu with Anthropic, the outlet argued, ignores how much more capital, revenue and enterprise reach the American lab actually has. Chairman Liu Debing, chief scientist Tang Jie and chief executive Zhang Peng, the Tsinghua trio who built Zhipu into China's first listed foundation model company, now oversee a business priced like a mature software franchise. It still runs at a nearly $700 million annual loss.\n\nZhipu isn't alone in this. Chinese AI stocks broadly have climbed this year on optimism around DeepSeek's low cost training claims and Moonshot AI's Kimi releases, feeding a narrative that China's AI sector can compete with Silicon Valley on a fraction of the capital. Zhipu, as the first of the country's so-called AI tigers to go public, has become the most visible proxy for that trade. Its next earnings report will show whether the API growth can close the gap, or whether the stock is just riding a wave that hasn't reached the balance sheet yet.\n\n**Also read:** [Kimi K3 tops Claude Opus 4.8 on a major coding benchmark and rattles AI valuations](https://startupfortune.com/kimi-k3-tops-claude-opus-48-on-a-major-coding-benchmark-and-rattles-ai-valuations/) • [Buffett Says He Personally Built Berkshire's $31 Billion Bet on Alphabet](https://startupfortune.com/buffett-says-he-personally-built-berkshires-31-billion-bet-on-alphabet/) • [TSMC Pledges Another $100 Billion for US Chip Plants After Record Quarter](https://startupfortune.com/tsmc-pledges-another-100-billion-for-us-chip-plants-after-record-quarter/)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/zhipu-stock-soared-1500-percent-while-revenue-stayed-under-105-million", "canonical_source": "https://startupfortune.com/zhipu-stock-soared-1500-percent-while-revenue-stayed-under-105-million/", "published_at": "2026-07-17 06:41:21+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-17 07:01:54.444082+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-startups", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Zhipu", "Knowledge Atlas Technology", "Z.ai", "Tsinghua University", "GLM", "JPMorgan", "China Merchants Securities", "Bloomberg"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/zhipu-stock-soared-1500-percent-while-revenue-stayed-under-105-million", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/zhipu-stock-soared-1500-percent-while-revenue-stayed-under-105-million.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/zhipu-stock-soared-1500-percent-while-revenue-stayed-under-105-million.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/zhipu-stock-soared-1500-percent-while-revenue-stayed-under-105-million.jsonld"}}