A Chinese rival to DeepSeek soared more than 60 per cent in its trading debut on Friday, as the country’s AI hopefuls rush to tap public markets to fund model development and global expansion.
MiniMax, a Shanghai-based large language model company, raised $619mn in its Hong Kong IPO, buoyed by investor enthusiasm over China’s advances in artificial intelligence. MiniMax’s stock price was HK$253 ($32.46) after pricing its shares at HK$165 each, to bring its market capitalisation to about $9.8bn.
Chinese LLM companies have turned to stock markets earlier than their US counterparts, which have raised tens of billions of dollars in private funding. Zhipu, a Beijing-based competitor, became the first LLM start-up to list globally on Thursday, raising $558mn in Hong Kong. Shares of Zhipu are up 29 per cent since its IPO.