Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk

2/26/26, 14:44 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk Page 1 of 14 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo Zhipu and MiniMax IPO prospectus treasure-hunting! IRENE ZHANG JAN 19, 2026 3 5 This month both Zhipu (also known as Z.ai) and MiniMax made initial public o:er (IPOs) on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX), making them the world’s Grst t pure-play AI companies to go public. Securities laws generally require companies submit lengthy prospectuses disclosing information relevant for investors before o:ering shares to the public. In the cases of Zhipu and MiniMax, these are gold m of information about not only their corporate fundamentals, but also their views on internal culture, and how they Gt into the Chinese AI puzzle. I spent the past few days with these prospectuses and came out of reading with a plethora of observations and questions. Below are some Gndings and early thought featuring: Zhipu’s Model as a Service (MaaS) = SaaS + AI? China’s competitive, ever-changing cloud computing landscape; AGI is what you want it to be; And an early look at how good of a business AI boyfriends are… Going public requires a company to be very explicit about what they are selling. He the two companies diverge the most. Zhipu frames its product strategy around mo 54 What is the product? -- 1 of 14 -- 2/26/26, 14:44 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk Page 2 of 14 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo as-a-service (MaaS — an acronym which appears 96 times in the prospectus), while MiniMax has an array of diverse products that consumers are already familiar with from chatbots and video generation platforms to its signature companion app Talkie/Xingye. But MiniMax, self-reportedly, also wants to deliver “technology as products.” MaaS customers buy access to the AI model, rather than products built on top of, o outputs generated by, the model. In other words, this emphasis on MaaS tries to tu the pure-play AI market into a kind of (mostly B2B) SaaS, with API calls at the cen The impulse to constantly assert that the technology itself is the product is an interesting one. Both Zhipu and MiniMax are eager to describe themselves as foundation-model companies Grst, even if they have more speciGc application products that are clearly proGtable (in the case of MiniMax). Is this a move to persu investors to support costly R&D? Or to gain credibility as frontier labs in a hostile Western-dominated landscape? Or is it both? We learn from Zhipu’s prospectus that it considers the public sector to be a signiG source of revenue. It has particularly courted the telecommunications sector, whic heavily dominated by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China. Of all the revenue i derived from on-premise deployment — the preferred format of public-sector clien due to privacy considerations — in the Grst nine months of 2025, 13.6% came from telecommunications, while a further 29.4% was derived from other public-sector clients. Its second-biggest customer in 2025 was almost certainly the Ningxia bran of China Telecom (“a telecommunications network operation Company … [which h registered capital of RMB213.1 billion and is listed on both Shanghai Stock Exchan and HKEx”, per the prospectus). While the prospectus does not explain exactly how much of Zhipu’s overall revenue comes from government organs and SOEs, we can surmise that the percentage is signiGcant. Who’s buying from them? -- 2 of 14 -- 2/26/26, 14:44 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk Page 3 of 14 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo With its Tsinghua roots, Zhipu is a state-fund darling. In comparison, MiniMax ha courted as much government money. Both companies disclosed the amounts of government grants each received per year in their prospectuses: Amount of revenue earned through government grants per year (USD millions) Get the data Created with Datawrapper Jan 2022 Apr Jul Oct Jan 2023 Apr Jul Oct Jan 2024 Apr Jul Oct 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 • In terms of the private sector, Zhipu names Gve real-life clients in its prospectus: Kingsol Omce (⾦⼭办公, the company behind popular Chinese omce suite WPS Omce), Nieta (捏Ta, an AI character creation platform), the hiring platform Zhaopin.com, Inner-Mongolian dairy producer Mengniu (蒙⽜), and the academic database AMiner. Their case studies reveal interesting insights into exactly how companies are deploying AI. The cases range from obvious practical use cases to the more experimental. In the of Zhaopin.com, Zhipu helped the site build a conversational chatbot assistant for jobseekers and recruiters. Dairy Grm Mengniu used Zhipu’s model for an “AI nutritionist” mini-app where users can ask questions about healthy eating and trac daily habits. -- 3 of 14 -- 2/26/26, 14:44 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk Page 4 of 14 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo Before ChatGPT Health, there was MENGNIU.GPT… Kingsol Omce and AMiner both used AI models to summarize and generate documents within their ecosystems. Nieta is the only multimodal case: Zhipu help them launch a short-form video generation agent on their platform. A Chinese ana described the resulting tool as “Sora for anime fans”: -- 4 of 14 -- 2/26/26, 14:44 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk Page 5 of 14 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo We also get conGrmation that Zhipu is involved with sovereign AI e:orts in South Asia, in the form of “building national and municipal foundation model platforms. Zhipu earned almost 18 million RMB (around US$2.6 million) from deploying large models on-premise in Malaysia and Singapore in the Grst nine months of 2025, compared to 860,000 RMB (~US$123k) in the US for the same types of services over same period. These three are the only markets where Zhipu has helped customers deploy on-premise. MiniMax’s o:erings are more consumer-facing, and its prospectus paints a broade picture. In terms of user numbers, they report that more than 212 million customer across 200+ countries and regions used their AI-native products in the Grst nine months of 2025. That’s roughly the population of Brazil! Where are the GPUs from? -- 5 of 14 -- 2/26/26, 14:44 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk Page 6 of 14 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo We learn from MiniMax’s prospectus that it does not have its own training cluster and has no meaningful local compute. The company calls it a “light-asset” strategy also outsources content moderation, digital marketing, and data labelling.) Over the course of its existence, MiniMax has used a diverse range of cloud compu suppliers as its compute demand skyrocketed. Suppliers A, B, C, G, and H are Chin Grms, I and K are based in Singapore, and J is incorporated in both. (Letters used t anonymize suppliers in the chart above revect the letters used in MiniMax’s origin prospectus.) Zhipu is not quite as forthcoming, but it also frames computing resources as mostl coming from outside providers. In 2022 and 2023, some of the company’s largest purchases were sourced from suppliers of “computing hardware” rather than “computer services” (the latter, in this context, tend to mostly denote cloud -- 6 of 14 -- 2/26/26, 14:44 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk Page 7 of 14 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo computing), implying some degree of local compute. By 2025, however, all of its top-Gve suppliers were cloud computing providers. Giv information about its top-Gve suppliers each year, we can also see that it works wit an ever-changing range of cloud-computing suppliers for credit terms both long an short. All of the cloud suppliers on Zhipu’s disclosed list are Chinese. -- 7 of 14 -- 2/26/26, 14:44 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk Page 8 of 14 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo The American AI economy is a circle-dealing bonanza. China’s situation is very di:erent: state funds are major players, most parties are far more cash-constrained and potential policy interventions loom large over the sector. Beijing is careful not bet too much of the country’s economic future on unpredictable developments in A and watches out for bubble dynamics closely. But some Chinese AI companies do want shares of each other’s pies. Zhipu’s inves include Meituan and Tencent, while two of MiniMax’s major pre-IPO investors we subsidiaries of Tencent and Alibaba. This creates an interesting dynamic where leading tech giants’ AI initiatives are competing against startup labs, but they’re al investing in startups to improve their positioning across the sector. Are there circular deals in Chinese AI? -- 8 of 14 -- 2/26/26, 14:44 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk Page 9 of 14 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo Another interesting MiniMax investor is game studio miHoYo, the maker of Gensh Impact (one of the highest-grossing mobile games of all time), revecting cross- pollination between AI companions and other entertainment industries. AI companion companies have closely courted animation and video game fans from th start, and in turn, these communities have found homes on platforms like Talkie. It’s whatever you want it to be! Companies are incentivized to describe the AI futu ways that Gt their current product strategy, so it’s not surprising that the two prospectuses imagine AGI in ways clearly favorable for themselves. Zhipu’s prospectus is a surprisingly ideological document. The company thinks LL are the main form factor for achieving higher levels of machine intelligence. It beli there are Gve stages to LLMs’ development: pretraining, alignment reasoning, self- learning, self-perception, and consciousness. We haven’t gotten to self-perception consciousness yet, and Zhipu tells investors that they cannot guarantee achieving those stages. (They also cannot guarantee that sentient machines will still be committed to maximizing shareholder value.) Its business strategy, as proposed to investors, stems from this uncompromising worldview. MiniMax, on the other hand, describes its goal as AI that can “[perform] the full ra of human intellectual tasks” — more obviously monetizable, and perhaps more mo and vexible. Because “real world human interaction is inherently multimodal,” it argues, the pursuit of higher forms of machine intelligence should focus on multimodality instead of LLMs, and it is perhaps for this reason that its audio and video generation models have seen strong growth. MiniMax’s team is very young: t average age of its R&D team is under 30. (It says in its prospectus that users of Talkie/Xingye are also young.) It emphasizes its nimble organizational structure an youthful vibrancy in its pitch to investors. Zhipu, in comparison, stresses its deep connections to academia and hard-hitting research. What about AGI? -- 9 of 14 -- 2/26/26, 14:44 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk Page 10 of 14 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo The product bringing in the largest share of revenue for MiniMax remains Talkie/Xingye, its popular AI companion app. In the Grst nine months of 2025, the were around 5.6 million monthly active users of Hailuo AI, MiniMax’s video gener Talkie/Xingye had 20 million in the same period. This was despite the company cutting marketing spending by 90% in that period to focus on organic growth. MiniMax is aware of the social risks of AI companions, but its framing of these iss can be hilariously naive. A literal quote from the IPO prospectus: As model intelligence and memory capabilities continue to advance, we foresee future ‘Her’-style moment where everyone has an AI companion that truly know them and proactively assists in all aspects of their lives. The Torment Nexus is evergreen: MiniMax thinks the future of digital companionship stretches as wide as humanity does, with a new generation of AI-native internet users “naturally inclined to inter with AI companions.” There is some acknowledgement of the legal risks companio misuse may create for shareholders, but otherwise, their lawyers have curated a su attitude towards a future where we’re all emotionally entangled with language mod Alex Blechman @AlexBlechman Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus 11:49 PM · Nov 8, 2021 300 Replies · 32.6K Reposts · 116K Likes A grab bag of miscellaneous -- 10 of 14 -- 2/26/26, 14:44 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk Page 11 of 14 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo Cultural and media industries in China are procuring a surprising amount of A technology. One of MiniMax’s biggest customers is “[a] comprehensive cultura industry group headquartered in Shanghai, China, with digital reading as its foundation and IP cultivation and development at its core.” (It’s almost certain Yuewen Group 阅⽂集团, a Tencent-backed digital reading conglomerate.) Zhi top client in 2025, an unnamed IT company, primarily engaged it to work on “a related learning services, live-streaming e-commerce, cultural tourism researc and study, smart education services, and AI education.” From Zhipu’s prospectus, we learn that the partially state-owned company iFly had the biggest market share for LLMs in China at 9.4% in 2024. Zhipu ranked second with 6.6%, followed by Alibaba (6.4%), SenseTime (6.1%), and lastly Baid (4.7%). Zhipu’s analysis implies that iFlytek reached the top of the market by rolling out LLM-based services to its existing user base, which is very large. T is a reminder not to write o: state-amliated players in the Chinese AI industr especially ones with massive access to surveillance data and public-sector part like SenseTime and iFlytek. (MiniMax’s founder himself is a SenseTime alum.) Zhipu made a preliminary Gling for an A-shares listing back in April 2025, but ultimately decided to list in Hong Kong to attract a broader base of overseas investors. Zhipu tries to distinguish itself as the only major Chinese AI player to care de about safety as it is understood internationally. It was the only Chinese compa to sign the Frontier AI Safety Commitments in Seoul back in 2024. Zhipu doesn’t think either open- or closed-source AI will “win.” As its prospec describes, “[in] the future, open-source models will play a key role in driving technical innovation and fostering collaboration within the community, while closed-source models will take the lead in commercial applications and enterp services.” observations -- 11 of 14 -- 2/26/26, 14:44 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk Page 12 of 14 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo The biggest USD investor in MiniMax’s IPO, with $65 million, is the Abu Dha Investment Authority. MiniMax has two major subsidiaries based in Singapore: Subsup, incorporated 2022, and Nanonoble, incorporated in 2024. It begs the question: why didn’t MiniMax pursue the “Manus maneuver” and move overseas altogether? What the best arguments against “China shedding” as an AI company? The AI girlfriend business has razor-thin margins. The average Talkie/Xingye customer spent only US$5 in the Grst nine months of 2025, and the number actually went down from 2024 to 2025 as MiniMax tried to court a larger international user base that’s cost-conscious. (According to Sensor Tower, the the Philippines, and Mexico have the largest numbers of Talkie users.) Recurri revenue is also more complicated for this side of their business, as users can p on-the-go for tokens rather than subscriptions. MiniMax brings up an interesting dimension of open-source solware use in th “Risks” section of their prospectus. They argue that since the terms of many o source licenses have not been interpreted by courts, these licenses might later be “construed in a way that could impose unanticipated conditions or restrict ability to commercialize our products.” Will companies ever start to legally weaponize vague open-source licenses to compete with each other? All this only scratches the surface of the information disclosed in these two documents, which give us rare insight into the AI business in China as it stands to Have more thoughts or observations? We’d love to hear from you! For more analysis, check out coverage by Hello China Tech here and 36Kr here. ChinaTalk is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. -- 12 of 14 -- 2/26/26, 14:44 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk Page 13 of 14 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo 54 Likes ∙ 5 Restacks Discussion about this post 1 more comment... Type your email... Subscribe Write a comment... Vincent Chow Jan 21 Liked by Irene Zhang 1 reply Great post, just a note that the market share data from Frost & Sullivan were for 2024. Almos certainly saw huge shifts last year after the DeepSeek moment - but absolutely agree not to off the old-time players like iFlytek and SenseTime LIKE (1) REPLY Guido Jan 22 Super interesting article. I’m genuinely surprised by Zhipu’s view on the future of AI in its IPO document. Basically, I don’t expect an AI lab to offer even a minimal critique of the conseque AGI LIKE REPLY Comments Restacks -- 13 of 14 -- 2/26/26, 14:44 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO - by Irene Zhang - ChinaTalk Page 14 of 14 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/zhipu-and-minimax-ipo © 2026 Jordan Schneider · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice Substack is the home for great culture -- 14 of 14 --