Zhipu AI Shares Down 44% Within Seven Days After Placement, Over HK$300 Billion in Market Cap Wiped Out in Two Days
N.R. Finch
Just seven days after its HK$31.4 billion placement at HK$1,588 per share, Zhipu AI (智谱AI) closed at HK$890.5 — a 43.9% paper loss for subscribers — wiping out over HK$300 billion in market cap in two trading sessions and delivering the sharpest test yet of Hong Kong's AI-model valuation logic.
Down Nearly Half in a Week — What Happened?
Zhipu AI completed a HK$31.4 billion placement at HK$1,588 per share on July 13. Seven calendar days later, the stock closed at HK$890.5.
It plunged 28% last Friday, then dropped another 19.56% on Monday — erasing over HK$300 billion in market cap across two sessions.
From its intraday peak above HK$1 trillion, the cumulative decline is roughly 60%. This means → in under a month, Zhipu AI went from "trillion-dollar newcomer" to a halved stock.
Kimi K3 Launched — Why Did It Blow Up the Entire Sector?
Friday's crash was triggered by the official release of Kimi K3, a model from Moonshot AI (月之暗面) — 2.8 trillion parameters, with blended API pricing at US$2.3 per million tokens, a new high for Chinese models.
Goldman Sachs noted that K3 ranks at the global frontier in both the Arena.ai coding leaderboard and the Artificial Analysis intelligence score. In plain terms = China's AI models in coding and agentic capability are no longer a one-player game — they have entered a multi-leader stage.
MiniMax fell 16% the same day. This reflects a sector-wide repricing, not an isolated Zhipu story — once multiple frontier models compete head-to-head, the "scarcity premium" collapses.
DeepSeek Raising More Capital — Will Competition Get Even Fiercer?
DeepSeek recently closed a RMB 50 billion round at a RMB 350 billion valuation and is seeking fresh funding at roughly US$71 billion.
More models are set for dense launches in the second half. This means → companies without a clear technical moat face even steeper valuation discounts ahead.
How Heavy Is the Lock-Up Pressure?
Zhipu AI's lock-up period expired in early July, freeing 25.68 million shares held by cornerstone investors.
All 11 cornerstones — including funds under Beijing Financial Holdings, Shanghai Gaoyi, Taikang Life, and GF Fund — have said they are in no rush to sell. Yet their paper gain still sits at 666%. In plain terms = they say they won't sell, but they're sitting on nearly a 7× return — the temptation to lock in profits is hard to ignore.
Monday's turnover hit HK$11.09 billion. A single board lot costs nearly HK$90,000, pricing out most retail investors; the flow is overwhelmingly institutional.
Can the Trillion-Dollar Narrative Survive?
The earlier HK$1 trillion valuation rested on two pillars: the scarcity premium of being the "first large-model IPO" + a commercialization story of rising API volume and pricing. A shifting competitive landscape is eroding both at once.
MiniMax, which listed around the same time, is equally weak — market cap down to HK$67.4 billion. Its placement price of HK$268 sits well above the current HK$193.1, also deeply underwater.
Whether Zhipu AI's current HK$414.6 billion market cap adequately prices in competitive risk depends on whether it can find a new balance among model-iteration speed, pricing power, and monetization — and the HK$31.4 billion in trapped placement capital makes that balance harder to strike.
Content is for reference only, not financial advice.