China’s Zhipu AI stock surges 120% on AI optimism

Chinese AI company Zhipu’s stock has more than doubled this week, with a 120% rise, driven by investor interest in emerging generative AI firms.

The Hong Kong-listed shares reached a record HK$492 (US$62.95) on February 13, while peers like Minimax Group also saw significant gains.

The surge follows recent product upgrades, including Zhipu’s release of its latest large language model, GLM-5, which outperformed a competitor from Moonshot AI on benchmarking sites.

The company also raised the price of its GLM Coding Plan by 30%, amid rising demand.

Additionally, Zhipu reportedly hired advisory firms for a potential Shanghai Star Market listing.

Analysts from JPMorgan Chase & Co. named Zhipu and Minimax as top picks for capturing future AI value, citing their independent development of large language models.

However, some market participants warn that the rapid rally may be driven by thin trading volumes and could be unsustainable.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Zhipu’s new model makes bold technical claims, but sources do not back all of them

Zhipu’s stock jumped after it released GLM-5. Coverage describes GLM-5 as having about 744 billion total parameters, often rounded to 744 billion or 745 billion. Some reports say training ran entirely on Huawei Ascend chips, Huawei’s AI accelerator processors, which fits a China AI self-reliance storyline 1.
Artificial Analysis testing put GLM-5 at a record-low hallucination rate, with an AA-Omniscience Index score of -1. VentureBeat links the result to the model declining to answer more often instead of guessing, which it casts as stronger knowledge reliability 2.
The company raised prices for its Coding Plan. An official notice cited by The STAR Market Daily says packages start rising at 30%, while existing subscribers keep their current prices. Separate reporting says the overseas version lifted Coding Plan subscriptions by 30% to 60%, plus API call prices by 67% to 100% 3.
The same report calls it the first major price hike by a domestic large model since 2026. It ties the move to a shift away from bargain pricing, plus higher demand and rising supply-side costs 4.

China’s AI pricing shifts signal faster commercialization

The STAR Market Daily frames Zhipu’s increase as a sign of a Chinese AI market that is settling into value-based pricing, rather than prolonged price wars 4.
Within the Big Model Six Tigers, reporting says Zhipu, MoonShadow, MiniMax, and StepStellar raised some API prices in 2025. Baichuan Intelligence and ZeroOne Everything kept pricing unchanged 3.
VentureBeat says GLM-5’s MIT open-source license, a permissive software license that generally allows broad use and modification, can help enterprises avoid vendor lock-in. It also flags tradeoffs tied to geopolitics and data governance because the lab is based in China 2.
VentureBeat frames the model’s agentic focus, including producing office documents, as a push beyond chatbots toward more autonomous agents. The same commentary raises autonomy and safety worries, which should be treated as its view rather than an industry-wide conclusion 2.