Thus far, there has been no way for retail investors to participate directly in the AI revolution, but some pure-play AI companies are beginning to list on the stock markets.
Chinese AI startup Z.AI is set to list on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Z.AI, listing as Knowledge Atlas Technology, is offering 37.4 million shares worth HK$116.20 apiece according to a filing on HKEX. The company plans to raise HK$4.35 billion ($560 million) through the listing. Trading in the stock will begin on 8th January and Chinese investment bank CICC is the chief sponsor of the issue.
“Thrilled to share that Z.AI is set to be the first AI-native LLM company to list on the global market,” Z.AI’s Zixuan Li wrote on X.
Originally known as Zhipu AI, Z.ai is a leading Chinese artificial intelligence company that emerged from Tsinghua University in 2019 as a spin-out startup. The company has established itself as one of China’s “AI Tiger” companies, and just released GLM 4.7, which is the best open model in the world.
The company has attracted substantial backing from China’s tech giants, with investors including Alibaba, Tencent, Ant Group, Meituan, Xiaomi, and HongShan. A 2023 funding round brought in 2.5 billion yuan (approximately $350 million USD). Z.ai rebranded internationally in 2025, positioning itself as a global competitor to established AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude. The company’s GLM model family powers advanced chatbots and assistants, with particular strength in technical domains such as coding, complex reasoning, and content creation. Features like model-native presentation and poster generation distinguish Z.ai’s offerings in the marketplace.
The company’s mission centers on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) to benefit humanity through machines capable of human-like thinking. Despite its technological advances, Z.ai faces geopolitical challenges—in January 2025, the U.S. Commerce Department added the company to its Entity List over national security concerns, potentially limiting its access to certain American technologies.
First AI IPO out of many?
Z.AI isn’t the only AI model company that’s going public next year. Fellow Chinese AI company Minimax is also preparing to go public soon as per reports. In the US, OpenAI is rumoured to be preparing for a massive IPO which could be among the largest in the world, and Anthropic too is looking to go public.
AI Model Company Landscape
There are relatively few companies that can make top tier AI models. Some of them are large labs like Google, which make closed-source frontier models. Then there are other American players like OpenAI and Anthropic that are private, but also make frontier closed-source models. There are around a dozen AI companies in China that make high-quality AI models, which are invariably open. Some of them, like Alibaba and Tencent, are large public conglomerates, while others are smaller startups like DeepSeek, Z.AI or Moonshot AI. Then there are a few companies in other locations, such as Mistral in France and LG in South Korea making AI models. AI models are getting quite similar and commoditized, and can require large investments, so it’s not as though these companies will be a slam dunk for retail investors. But with many of these companies slated to be public next year, retail investors will have the option to dip their toes in companies making some cutting-edge AI models around the world.