Are Z.ai and MiniMax heading down opposite financial paths months after Hong Kong IPOs?

South China Morning Post - Sep 3, 2026

When two of China’s leading AI pioneers went public in Hong Kong in January, they pitched investors on a shared promise: capturing the explosive demand for artificial intelligence at home and abroad. Their first-half earnings, however, suggest that narrative could be splintering into two different trajectories. While Beijing-based Z.ai, also known as Zhipu AI, is winning over market analysts on the back of surging revenue and top-tier model performance, its Shanghai rival MiniMax is facing...

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How China Works author on the data economy, robots and AI

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The Chinese-founded artificial intelligence start-up Manus announced on Tuesday that it had formally resumed independent operations, more than four months after Beijing blocked its US$2 billion acquisition by Meta Platforms. The company’s founding team would continue to lead Manus as an “independent agent lab”, the firm said in a blog post on its website, as it sought to move on from a months-long saga that has sent ripples through the Chinese and global technology sectors. The announcement came...

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Pallas-1 sees China’s Galactic Energy join reusable launch push, closing in on SpaceX

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Chinese rocket maker Galactic Energy has successfully sent its Pallas-1 medium-to-large reusable rocket into orbit, marking the latest milestone in Beijing’s drive to develop reusable launch capabilities and narrow the gap with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The two-stage, liquid-propellant rocket lifted off at 10am on Tuesday from a self-built launch pad at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre’s commercial pilot zone in northwestern China’s Gansu province before entering its designated orbit, according to...

China’s Z.ai revenue jumps 400% as total losses narrow on explosive cloud gains

China’s Z.ai revenue jumps 400% as total losses narrow on explosive cloud gains

Chinese artificial intelligence company Z.ai on Monday reported a 400 per cent increase in first-half revenue, driven by explosive growth in its open platform and application programming interface business, which helped narrow total losses despite higher research and development spending. Revenue for the six months ended June 30 rose to 953.89 million yuan (US$142 million). Full-year sales were expected to expand 514 per cent to 4.45 billion yuan, according to consensus estimates from analysts...

Huawei, with an eye on self-reliance, ploughs 25% of revenue into R&D at expense of profits

Huawei, with an eye on self-reliance, ploughs 25% of revenue into R&D at expense of profits

Huawei Technologies poured more than a quarter of its first-half revenue into research and development, prioritising long-term technological independence over short-term earnings as first-half profit plunged 36 per cent. R&D expenses jumped 25 per cent year on year to 121.4 billion yuan (US$18 billion) for the six months through June, accounting for over 25 per cent of total revenue, according to a filing on Monday with the Shanghai Clearing House, the primary central clearing counterparty in...

China’s AI chip drive: MetaX and Iluvatar swing to profit, as Biren narrows losses

China’s AI chip drive: MetaX and Iluvatar swing to profit, as Biren narrows losses

China’s home-grown artificial intelligence chipmakers are starting to cash in on Beijing’s self-reliance drive, but a fresh wave of first-half earnings reveals a stark divide between the industry’s rising profit stars and loss-making players. Shares of Chinese AI chipmakers traded mixed on Monday as investors digested the financial updates. MetaX Integrated Circuits saw its Shanghai-listed stock rise 2.4 per cent to 691.2 yuan on Monday after reporting a swing to profitability late on Sunday....

Sony Music, Warner accuse Anthropic of ‘blatant theft’ in major new lawsuit

Sony Music, Warner accuse Anthropic of ‘blatant theft’ in major new lawsuit

Some of the world’s biggest music publishers have launched a fresh lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the artificial intelligence giant of conducting “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history”. The case adds to the legal challenges facing Anthropic as the firm eyes a potential blockbuster initial public offering, as the AI industry confronts growing pushback over its use of human-made material to train its models. Sony Music Publishing, Warner...

CXMT joins growing list of Chinese tech firms suing US Pentagon over blacklists

CXMT joins growing list of Chinese tech firms suing US Pentagon over blacklists

Leading chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) has joined a growing list of Chinese technology companies suing the US government over their additions to Pentagon blacklists, as legal experts said US courts had shown a willingness to hold the Department of Defence to account. Recent rulings involving Chinese tech firms including lidar sensor maker Hesai Group, drone manufacturer DJI and biotech firm WuXi AppTec indicated that judges were prepared to scrutinise the US government’s evidence...

China’s CXMT posts massive 870% revenue surge as ‘aggressive expansion’ pays off

China’s CXMT posts massive 870% revenue surge as ‘aggressive expansion’ pays off

Chinese chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) reported a sharp surge in first-half revenue on Friday, as the firm released its first financial results since becoming China’s most valuable publicly traded company in a blockbuster Shanghai listing last month. The Hefei-based firm – China’s leading maker of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) products – posted revenue of 150.31 billion yuan (US$22.4 billion) for the six months to June, up 873.64 per cent year on year, according to a filing...

Meituan snaps losing streak with profitable June quarter though Douyin threat looms

Meituan snaps losing streak with profitable June quarter though Douyin threat looms

On-demand delivery giant Meituan swung back to profitability in the second quarter as China’s price war in food delivery cooled, allowing the company to scale back subsidies and target higher-value customers. Beijing-based Meituan posted an adjusted net profit of 2.5 billion yuan (US$372 million) for the June quarter, snapping a three-quarter losing streak according to its earnings report on Friday. The figure beat average analyst forecasts of 340 million yuan compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue rose...

MiniMax expands Alibaba cloud pact as compute needs surge for training and inference

MiniMax expands Alibaba cloud pact as compute needs surge for training and inference

Chinese artificial intelligence firm MiniMax has raised the three-year purchase ceiling on its cloud computing deals with Alibaba Group Holding by 220 per cent to US$1.2 billion, underscoring surging demand for computing power among the country’s top AI developers. The Shanghai-based company planned to spend up to US$300 million on Alibaba Cloud services this year, nearly triple its original US$115 million cap, after burning through two-thirds of its budget by the end of June, according to its...

China thinks big on brain-computer interfaces after world-first surgery

China thinks big on brain-computer interfaces after world-first surgery

Chinese surgeons last month completed the world’s first commercial surgery to implant an invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) device in a patient with a spinal cord injury, a milestone in the neurotechnology development race with US companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink. This month a Chinese company, state-owned PICC Property and Casualty, launched the world’s first commercial insurance policy covering BCI implantation surgery. September will see the first undergraduates in China to major in...

Alibaba pushes into South America’s AI market with launch of Brazil data centres

Alibaba pushes into South America’s AI market with launch of Brazil data centres

Alibaba Group Holding has launched its first data centres in South America, as the Chinese technology giant ramps up its artificial intelligence infrastructure buildout in emerging markets amid an intensifying US-China AI rivalry. The Hangzhou-based company announced on Thursday that its new Brazilian venture would operate two data centres offering local enterprises secure cloud infrastructure and a suite of “agentic AI services”. “Brazil is one of the world’s most dynamic digital economies and...

Zhipu AI shares jump as viral Ox Alpha model revealed as GLM-5.3-Flash on Chinese chips

Zhipu AI shares jump as viral Ox Alpha model revealed as GLM-5.3-Flash on Chinese chips

China’s Zhipu AI has launched its latest open-weight model, GLM-5.3-Flash – previously code-named Ox Alpha – saying that the system ran entirely on a cluster of 100,000 domestically produced chips during a high-profile stealth trial. The announcement followed a week of heavy traffic on artificial intelligence model marketplace OpenRouter and agent platform OpenCode, where the model processed 62 trillion tokens before its formal release on Wednesday, according to Zhipu. On OpenRouter, the system...

Nvidia ships first H200 chips to China, but forecasts no data-centre computing revenue

Nvidia ships first H200 chips to China, but forecasts no data-centre computing revenue

Nvidia has confirmed its first shipments of H200 data-centre processors to China under a new US licensing scheme, ending a months-long lockout. However, the sales accounted for less than 1 per cent of the company’s US$89 billion data-centre revenue in its second quarter, which ended on July 26. The H200 disclosure marked a shift from the previous quarter, when Nvidia said it had made no shipments of Data Centre Hopper products to China. Although Washington approved H200 exports in January,...

MiniMax revenue surges 283% but remains behind pace to meet forecast amid crowded AI race

MiniMax revenue surges 283% but remains behind pace to meet forecast amid crowded AI race

Chinese artificial intelligence firm MiniMax on Wednesday posted a 283 per cent surge in first-half revenue to US$116.6 million, powered by a 700 per cent jump in its enterprise business, though top-line growth remains off pace to hit full-year analyst forecasts. Revenue for the six months ended June 30 accounted for roughly 32 per cent of the US$363.77 million expected by analysts for the full year 2026, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The company reported full-year revenue of...

AI boom, profit surge fuel China’s ambitious chip assembly buildout

AI boom, profit surge fuel China’s ambitious chip assembly buildout

China’s leading semiconductor packaging and testing companies have launched a multibillion-dollar capacity expansion drive, as they ride a surge in artificial intelligence demand, stellar first-half profit growth, and Beijing’s urgent push for tech self-sufficiency. In the first half of the year, China’s three leading outsourced chip packaging companies – Jiangsu Changjiang Electronics Technology (JCET), Tongfu Microelectronics and Huatian Technology – announced capacity expansion investments...

DeepSeek nears pre-IPO funding round as 2027 market debut takes shape: sources

DeepSeek nears pre-IPO funding round as 2027 market debut takes shape: sources

DeepSeek is nearing the completion of a new funding round valuing the company at about 500 billion yuan (US$74 billion) before investment, as the Chinese artificial intelligence start-up moves closer to a potential listing on Shanghai’s Star Market, according to people familiar with the matter. The company was seeking to raise about 50 billion yuan in the round, which was expected to close before the end of August, according to one person. Investors included incumbents from the company’s last...

Huawei, HP settle disputes with multi-year Wi-fi patent cross-licensing deal

Huawei, HP settle disputes with multi-year Wi-fi patent cross-licensing deal

China’s Huawei Technologies and US personal computer giant HP announced on Wednesday that they had reached a deal to license each other’s Wi-fi patents. The two companies signed a multi-year global patent cross-licensing agreement, which granted HP the right to use certain Huawei Wi-fi patents on its PCs for a fee. “This agreement is a strong testament to Huawei’s persistent independent innovation in cutting-edge fields in information and communications technology,” said Alan Fan, Huawei’s chief...

Divergent results for Apple suppliers highlight memory price squeeze ahead of new iPhone

Divergent results for Apple suppliers highlight memory price squeeze ahead of new iPhone

Two major Chinese suppliers to Apple posted divergent first-half results, underscoring how soaring memory prices are squeezing profits even as component makers pin their hopes on upcoming iPhone releases for a second-half rebound. Lens Technology, a Shenzhen- and Hong Kong-listed maker of smartphone glass screens, saw its net income nearly halve to 577 million yuan (US$85.8 million) in the six months through June, as revenue dropped 12.4 per cent to 28.9 billion yuan. The company blamed the...

Moon mission delay a hiccup, but Chinese rocket city Wenchang remains on the march

Moon mission delay a hiccup, but Chinese rocket city Wenchang remains on the march

For generations, Wenchang, on Hainan’s northeastern coast, was better known for coconuts, its namesake chicken and the emigrants who left for Southeast Asia in search of a living. Now the rhythms of life here have been altered, gradually and then all at once, by China’s space programme. Wenchang Space Launch Site staged its first launch in 2016. Since then it has become one of the country’s top name-cards for rocket launches. I was near the site over the weekend, excited to witness the planned...

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