Zhipu AI is considering a multibillion-dollar secondary share sale in Hong Kong, looking to capitalize on a stock rally that has pushed its market capitalization to a record HK$1 trillion, roughly $128 billion, in under six months, Bloomberg reported on June 24. No deal size or timeline has been confirmed, and the reporting characterizes discussions as ongoing. But the mere fact that a secondary offering at these levels is a plausible conversation marks a significant moment in the history of Chinese AI capital markets.
Zhipu, which trades in Hong Kong as Knowledge Atlas Technology, raised approximately HK$4.35 billion at HK$116.20 a share in its January 8, 2026 IPO, the first major large language model developer to list publicly anywhere in the world. By June 23, the stock had touched HK$2,980 intraday following a 42% single-day move, representing a gain of roughly 2,400% from the IPO price. A secondary offering priced anywhere near those levels would deliver substantial fresh capital for model development and infrastructure.
GLM-5.2 and the Catalyst Behind the Surge
The most recent spark for the rally was GLM-5.2, Zhipu’s open-source flagship model released on June 13. The company says the model uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with 744 billion total parameters and 40 billion active, carries a one-million-token context window, and ships under the MIT licence without regional restrictions.
Independent rankings placed GLM-5.2 second globally on the Code Arena front-end development benchmark, behind Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, the model that has become the standard for long coding tasks and agentic workflows.
JPMorgan raised its 2026 to 2030 revenue forecasts for Zhipu by 7% to 16% after the model’s release, citing stronger pricing power in China’s enterprise AI market. Two licensing deals with major Chinese banks and a state-owned cloud provider were disclosed shortly after, adding commercial substance to the benchmark performance. The combination of technical credibility and enterprise traction gave investors a narrative to attach to a stock that had already been moving on broader Chinese AI momentum.
The Dual-Exchange Capital Strategy
The prospective Hong Kong secondary offering sits within a broader dual-market capital strategy. Zhipu also announced plans on June 1 to pursue a listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market, targeting 15 billion yuan (approximately $2.2 billion) through a new issuance of 2% to 8% of post-issuance share capital.
Guotai Haitong Securities is serving as the tutoring institution after the application cleared the STAR Market’s acceptance stage on June 17. The disclosed use of proceeds includes 12 billion yuan for AI model development, 2 billion yuan for the MaaS platform, and 1 billion yuan for working capital.
If both transactions proceed, Zhipu would become the first Hong Kong-listed AI company to complete a full H-share to A-share dual listing, with Beijing’s securities regulator signaling support for the structure. The Hong Kong secondary offering would target international investors who already know the stock; the STAR Market listing would put Zhipu in front of domestic funds and retail investors seeking a local champion in the AI race.
The Valuation Question
The honest caveats are significant. Zhipu’s 2025 revenue was 724 million yuan, up 132% year on year, while its adjusted net loss reached 3.18 billion yuan. In the first quarter of 2026, its MaaS API business was running at an annualized rate of about $250 million. At a HK$1 trillion market cap, the stock trades at over 1,200 times trailing revenue. Even JPMorgan’s most optimistic case puts the 2027 price-to-sales ratio just above 100 times.
The stock’s reaction to the Shanghai listing announcement illustrated investor sensitivity to dilution: Zhipu shares fell on the day the A-share proposal was made public. The Hong Kong IPO’s cornerstone investors face their own decision soon, with the six-month lock-up expiring on July 8, 2026. Whether they sell into the market at the same time as any secondary offering proceeds will be a key variable in determining whether the stock can hold its gains through any deal pricing window.
What the Capital Raise Would Mean
If the Hong Kong secondary offering proceeds, it would give Zhipu significant capital to advance its GLM model development and MaaS platform at a time when competition in China’s enterprise AI market is intensifying. ByteDance’s valuation recently crossed $1 trillion on the back of its own AI monetization push, and Baidu and Moonshot AI are well-funded competitors with distribution advantages and cloud businesses that can absorb margin pressure for longer than a newly listed company.
The structural signal is worth noting regardless of whether the deal closes. A Chinese AI company is now valued at a level where a secondary raise in the billions is a plausible conversation, and international investors are willing to have it. Whether the stock can hold its gains through a deal pricing window is the question that matters next.
At 1,200 times trailing revenue, there is almost no room for execution risk. The secondary offering, if it comes, will be a test of how much of the future investors have already priced in.
A Template for China’s AI Capital Markets
A successful dual listing would establish a template for other Chinese AI companies to follow, raising capital from both international and domestic investors while maintaining the credibility that comes with trading on two major exchanges simultaneously. China’s AI research community has been increasingly prominent at top international conferences, and the capital markets are beginning to reflect that standing.
Zhipu’s trajectory, from a research lab to a publicly traded company with a trillion-dollar market cap in under six months, is the most vivid illustration yet of how quickly that shift is occurring.