Hello everyone. This is Cissy from Hong Kong, your #techAsia host this week.
The AI story moved fast this week and on multiple fronts simultaneously. In the US, Anthropic quietly filed for an initial public offering after recently raising capital at a massive $965bn valuation. In China, two of the country’s leading artificial intelligence start-ups, MiniMax and Zhipu, filed for Shanghai dual listings, just six months after the duo’s blockbuster IPOs in Hong Kong, a sign that Chinese AI is entering a new phase of institutional capital formation.
The week’s most dramatic market moment came from Tencent, with its shares posting their biggest intraday gain since late 2022 after the FT reported the company is testing a prototype AI agent to help its ubiquitous app WeChat’s 1.4bn users autonomously navigate its millions of mini programs. In Tencent’s Q4 earnings call, the company already said that a new agentic AI for WeChat was under development. Reports that the product could be launched as early as this month suggested a faster than expected rollout and the company appears to be accelerating its AI push, which might have fuelled the share rally, though its stock price dipped around 3 per cent the next day.