As a wave of record-breaking technology initial public offerings prepares to hit US markets, Chinese artificial intelligence executives and investors gathered in Shenzhen to project confidence, arguing that China’s distinct advantages in applications and hardware ecosystems will allow it to remain competitive despite a widening funding gap with American rivals.
The 2026 HKEX Future Tech Summit, hosted by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing on June 11, served as a rallying point for a domestic industry facing intense pressure from abroad. The conference opened with a symbolic display of China’s hardware ambitions: a dance performance by a humanoid robot developed by Shanghai-based Agibot Innovation Technology, one of the country’s most prominent embodied AI startups.
The US IPO Bonanza
The backdrop to the summit was the looming specter of record-breaking tech listings in the United States. SpaceX is reportedly targeting a record $75 billion raise in a Nasdaq IPO. Meanwhile, Anthropic has filed to go public following a fundraising round that valued it at $965 billion post-money, and OpenAI is reportedly targeting a $1 trillion valuation for its own eventual listing.
These figures represent a scale of capital mobilization that Chinese AI companies cannot currently match. In contrast, while Hong Kong IPOs from January to May 2026 reached HK$166.8 billion ($21.3 billion), more than doubling year-on-year and led by mainland AI companies, the total remains an order of magnitude smaller than the capital being raised by US counterparts.
Despite this disparity, attendees at the Shenzhen summit were largely dismissive of concerns that Chinese firms would be starved of the capital needed to compete. Ti Tong, a partner at Matrix Partners China, called the notion of an insurmountable funding gap “absurd,” asserting that “many new companies can completely surpass American companies.”
The Application Advantage
The consensus among Chinese executives is that while the US may lead in foundational model capabilities, China will win the race to commercialize AI through practical applications deployed at scale.
Zhang Chi, general manager of the finance industry at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, acknowledged that Chinese AI models currently lag their US counterparts by “about 100 days” in frontier capabilities. However, he emphasized that China’s “biggest advantage lies in applications,” pointing to the country’s vast pool of entrepreneurs and engineers focused on integrating AI into existing industries, from healthcare and finance to manufacturing and logistics.
This sentiment was echoed by Li Dahai, CEO of ModelBest, an AI startup incubated at Tsinghua University. Li argued that China’s true edge is its “rich device ecosystem,” which provides a massive platform for deploying lightweight, highly efficient AI models directly onto consumer electronics and industrial hardware. This strategy aligns closely with the 15th Five-Year Plan’s emphasis on embedding AI into everyday devices rather than concentrating it in massive centralized data centers.
Capital Markets and the Path to Liquidity
The strategy of focusing on applications and hardware integration is already yielding results for some of China’s largest tech firms. Pan Jian, co-chairman of battery giant CATL, told the summit that the company anticipates “a five to 10-fold increase in our overall business over the next five to 10 years,” driven in part by the electrification and intelligentization of the economy. CATL itself raised HK$41 billion in a 2025 Hong Kong share offering, followed by an additional HK$39.2 billion via a private placement in late April 2026.
For pure-play AI startups, the path to liquidity is increasingly running through Hong Kong. Prominent Chinese AI unicorns MiniMax and Zhipu have already listed on the HKEX, providing a template for others to follow. Bonnie Chan, CEO of HKEX, pitched the exchange as the natural home for these companies, stating that China “possesses the largest and most dynamic pool of growth opportunities and capital in the region.”
However, the funding environment is not without its challenges. As Chinese tech stocks broadly enter bear market territory, investor appetite for high-multiple AI listings may be cooling. The ability of Chinese AI companies to demonstrate clear paths to profitability will be increasingly important in attracting capital.
The Structural Funding Gap
The contrast between the two sides of the Pacific reflects a deeper structural divergence in how AI companies are being valued and financed. Training frontier models, building out data center infrastructure, and recruiting top-tier research talent all require sustained, large-scale capital deployment. Chinese AI companies have relied on a combination of domestic venture capital, strategic investments from tech giants, and proceeds from Hong Kong IPOs. While these channels have proven sufficient to fund competitive research, they have not yet produced the kind of multi-hundred-billion-dollar war chests that US rivals are accumulating through public markets.
The Hong Kong exchange has been working to address this gap. Its listing reforms for technology companies have attracted a wave of Chinese AI and hardware firms, and the recent listings of MiniMax and Zhipu have demonstrated genuine investor appetite for Chinese AI exposure. But the scale differential between a SpaceX Nasdaq IPO and the typical Hong Kong technology listing remains a structural challenge that the Chinese AI ecosystem will need to address as it moves into its next phase of development.
Divergent Paths
The divergent paths of the US and Chinese AI industries are becoming increasingly clear. While US firms like OpenAI and Anthropic pursue massive capital raises to develop increasingly large, resource-intensive frontier models, Chinese companies are focusing on efficiency, open-source ecosystems, and rapid commercial deployment.
Whether China’s application-focused strategy can compensate for the sheer volume of capital flowing into US foundational research remains the central question of the global AI race. But for the executives gathered in Shenzhen, the answer was a definitive yes, and the performance of the dancing humanoid robot that opened the conference was their opening argument.