Chinese AI Startup MiniMax to Seek $600 Million in Hong Kong IPO

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup MiniMax reportedly aims to raise over $600 million in an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong.

The company may start taking investor orders as early as Wednesday (Dec. 31) for a listing in January, although the size and timing of the deal could change, Bloomberg reported Tuesday (Dec. 30), citing unnamed sources.

MiniMax declined to comment on the report, according to Bloomberg.

The company is one of several firms racing to become the first Chinese generative AI startup to go public, and it aims to compete with U.S. leaders in the field, the report said.

Rival firm Knowledge Atlas Technology Joint Stock Co., also known as Zhipu AI or Z.ai, aims to raise $552 million from an IPO in Hong Kong, per the report.

It was reported in March that Zhipu AI raised more than 1 billion yuan ($137 million) in a funding round led by Hangzhou Municipal Construction Investment Group Co. and Shangcheng Capital, both of which have ties to the Hangzhou local government, with participation by existing backers Alibaba Group, Tencent and others.

PYMNTS reported that the time that Chinese AI startups came into focus after DeepSeek took Silicon Valley by surprise with foundation models that performed at par with the best AI models but at a fraction of the price.

In July, Z.ai released a new AI model that it said costs less to use than DeepSeek, is open source and can operate on eight Nvidia H20 chips.

The company said that the GLM-4.5 model series features two models — GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5-Air — that satisfy the requirements of agentic applications by unifying reasoning, coding and agentic capabilities.

Reuters reported Dec. 23 that global investors are betting on Chinese AI companies in hopes of finding the next DeepSeek and to diversify their investments.

China has fast-tracked listings of chip makers as the country seeks to attain tech independence and close the tech gap with the U.S., according to the report.

There has also been a wave of startups in China and Hong Kong, aiming to match the success of DeepSeek and tap into growing demand from investors.

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