Jukan
Semiconductor & AI Infrastructure Research at Citrini
Zhipu (Knowledge Atlas) is already valued at nutty levels. At HK$2,094, buying it on $1B of ARR is like paying $6T for Anthropic on $50B of ARR. Its GLM models are genuinely impressive, but that valuation comes before factoring in the headaches of owning Chinese stocks. x.comÂ
Knowledge Atlas (Zhipu) could be a painful ride in the near term as its IPO lockup expires on July 7. The stock is already down 39% ahead of the expiry, though still up 12x year to date. x.comÂ
Zhipu AI is a Chinese AI arbitrage, shipping models near frontier Western performance at a fraction of the valuation. Its GLM-5.1 scored 45.3 on a coding benchmark versus 47.9 for Claude Opus 4.6, a 2.6-point gap far smaller than the valuation gap. Zhipu is up 357% since its January IPO, double MiniMax's return, yet both trade at about $40B. x.comÂ
Zhipu, listed in Hong Kong as Knowledge Atlas Technology, has one of the most absurd valuations imaginable. It did about $105 million in revenue last year and lost more than four times that, yet the market valued it at roughly $128 billion this week, above 1,000x sales at the peak, on a float where barely 4% of the stock trades. Its open GLM-5.2 model may undercut Big Tech's AI moat, but valuation cannot be ignored forever. x.comÂ
MiniMax should draw renewed attention because it will likely release another model soon. Chinese AI labs are probably quite close to each other in progress, yet their valuations are far apart, so attention should rotate back to MiniMax sooner or later. It is also further down the dilution path than Zhipu. x.comÂ
Zhipu AI stands to gain as AI models commoditize and results hinge on engineering, where Chinese companies are strong. A model's effectiveness is model times engineering times compute; China cannot yet beat GPT's base models, but engineering in coding is becoming more important and masks model advantages. As models commoditize, Chinese models catching up through engineering and reputation is inevitable, and a breakthrough "Seedance moment" in coding could come soon. x.com x.com x.com x.comÂ