MiniMax Group Inc

Hong Kong share sales raised a record $47.5 billion in the third quarter as Chinese technology companies tapped investors for capital to fund artificial intelligence expansion, Bloomberg reported. Initial public offerings, placements and block trades during the July-to-September period produced the largest fundraising haul ever for those months, pushing the city's total for 2026 above $92 billion and putting Hong Kong within reach of the $112.5 billion annual record set in 2021. Alibaba Group's $10.2 billion follow-on offering was the quarter's largest transaction, while Zhongji Innolight raised almost $8 billion in Hong Kong's biggest listing in nearly seven years. AI model developer Z.AI has raised $9.6 billion this year through its IPO, placements and convertible bonds, and MiniMax, Shanghai Iluvatar CoreX Semiconductor and Shanghai Biren Technology also returned to investors shortly after their IPO lockups expired. The boom spread across Asia-Pacific, where third-quarter share sales exceeded $120 billion, the highest for the period in six years, with India raising a record $26 billion since July on domestic liquidity. Investor appetite is becoming more selective as markets weaken: the MSCI Asia-Pacific Index fell as much as 7% in July amid questions about returns from heavy AI spending, and only two of Hong Kong's 10 largest deals since July are currently trading above their offer prices.

U.S. banks have helped arrange 19 Chinese high-tech share sales worth $17.2 billion this year, nearly 30% of the sector's total issuance, according to Reuters citing LSEG data. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are among the banks riding the boom, which spans AI, chips and data-center infrastructure, ahead of a Thursday meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping with AI expected on the agenda. Goldman, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup helped arrange optical-components maker Zhongji Innolight's $6.8 billion Hong Kong listing, while Goldman and Morgan Stanley also worked on offerings from AI developer MiniMax and chipmakers Montage Technology and Iluvatar CoreX. JPMorgan Chase helped bring Victory Giant Technology's roughly $2.6 billion share sale to market. Polymarket traders give the U.S. and China a 10% chance of agreeing to pace the AI frontier by Dec. 31, with about $36,000 traded, while mainland Chinese and Hong Kong investors now hold more than $750 billion in U.S. equities, up 23% over the past year.

Chinese artificial intelligence company Z.ai released a new model Wednesday that it claims operates entirely on homegrown semiconductors, sending its Hong Kong-listed shares up more than 8% in Thursday trading. The low-cost model, called GLM-5.3-Flash, ranks 10th on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, ahead of DeepSeek V4 Pro Max. Z.ai said it used 100,000 China-made chips to handle all online requests for the model, which was released on Aug. 20 under the code name "Ox Alpha" and ranked first by usage on the global OpenRouter platform in the last week. CNBC could not independently verify the chip claims, and Z.ai declined to name the chip suppliers. The release comes amid U.S. restrictions on advanced chip sales to China, prompting domestic alternatives from Huawei and others. Separately, rival MiniMax's shares rose about 3% in Hong Kong after reporting a 283% revenue surge in the first half, though its adjusted net loss more than doubled to $293 million. Z.ai is scheduled to report its first-half results on Monday.

The General Office of the Shanghai Municipal People's Government issued the 15th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Strategic Emerging Industries in Shanghai, proposing to further comprehensively elevate the capability level of the integrated circuit industry, accelerate the research, development, and industrialization of high-end chips, and focus on developing high-end chips, AI-empowered design, advanced packaging, novel devices, and new-architecture chips. Meanwhile, CXMT announced that the over-allotment option for its initial public offering has been fully exercised, corresponding to an additional issuance of 1.003 billion shares, bringing total share capital to 67.884 billion shares. Hua Hong Semiconductor released its semi-annual report, with operating revenue of 9.574 billion yuan, up 19.41 percent year on year, and net profit of 399 million yuan, up 436.69 percent year on year. Lianxun Instruments saw net profit grow 903 percent year on year. In addition, MiniMax disclosed that its August annualized recurring revenue exceeded 800 million US dollars, and its token consumption in July reached 20 times the level at the start of the year.

AI application concept stocks surged again on August 4, with the Zhipu AI segment leading the gains and Chuanzhi Education locking in its seventh consecutive daily limit up. By the midday break, UCloud had risen over 12 percent, Kaiwen Education recorded three boards in two days, and Pingzhi Information and IAT Automobile Technology both gained more than 9 percent. On the news front, US-listed AI application concept stocks Palantir and Snap both reported results that beat expectations, sending their shares up more than 14 percent in after-hours trading at one point. Guolian Minsheng Securities believes the education sector is poised for a three-dimensional resonance of policy, supply, and demand, with AI plus education as the main investment theme. Huaxin Securities judges that 2026 will be a key watershed for the AI industry, and media application scenarios are also expected to capture the dividends of the AI era. Guosheng Securities flagged two industry shifts as opportunities: first, major domestic and overseas players are collectively betting on Work Agent, and Work is likely to become the next deterministic direction for token consumption after Coding; second, in multimodal AI, ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 and MiniMax's Hailuo H3 have been released in quick succession, with the competitive focus extending to controllability, editability, and commercial licensing, and downstream enterprises in short dramas, advertising, and film and television are expected to be the first to benefit.

Chinese AI firm MiniMax released its H3 video-generation model on Friday, capable of processing text, images, video, and audio to produce up to 15-second clips in 2K resolution with native stereo sound. The Shanghai-based company said it would release H3's model weights within days, extending the open-weight approach into video generation, and that generating 2K video would cost less than one-third of mainstream rival products. H3 is aimed at commercial applications including advertising, e-commerce, product design, and games, and was designed to work with several Chinese-made chips. MiniMax, one of China's well-funded 'AI tigers,' went public in Hong Kong in January and competes with ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 and Kuaishou's Kling 3.0 in the fast-growing video-model market.

Chinese open-weight AI models now occupy the top five spots on OpenRouter by weekly token usage, signaling a shift toward cheaper, customizable alternatives to premium American systems. The five models come from Tencent, Xiaomi, DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Z.ai, all allowing users to download, customize, and run them on their own infrastructure. This surge follows the release of Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, which rivals Anthropic's Fable and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 in key benchmarks, and comes as companies increasingly adopt lower-cost models for routine tasks like coding and summarization. Kong CEO Augusto Marietti noted that open-weight use has surged because flagship models are too expensive, while Mozilla CTO Raffi Krikorian compared using frontier AI for everyday work to driving a Ferrari to Whole Foods, adding that cheaper models can cost up to 50 times less. The trend threatens the premium pricing and blockbuster IPO plans of OpenAI and Anthropic, whose valuations depend on frontier AI remaining scarce and indispensable.

Minimax has announced plans to raise a net total of approximately HK$15.957 billion through a private placement and issuance of convertible bonds. Around 80% of the proceeds will be used to strengthen AI infrastructure and model research and development, with 10% allocated to the global expansion of its AI agent Harness. Zijin Mining Group has indicated that its net profit for the interim results ending June 2026 is expected to be approximately 39.1 billion yuan, up 68% year-on-year. TCL Electronics has forecast that its adjusted net profit for the same period will be between HK$1.48 billion and HK$1.65 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 40% to 56%.

Tec-Do and MiniMax are sponsoring the MARS2 Multimodal Reasoning Competition with a total prize pool of $100,000 USD, held alongside the MARS2 Workshop at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2026) in Malmö, Sweden. The competition features three tracks—Multimodal Advertisement Comprehension, Video Temporal Grounding, and Marketing Strategy Decoding and Conversion Analysis—designed to test complex, open-world reasoning and long-chain inference in enterprise-level environments. Keynote speakers include Paul Liang from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mihaela van der Schaar from the University of Cambridge, and Louis-Philippe Morency from Carnegie Mellon University. The workshop also invites paper submissions on topics such as multimodal reasoning and agentic systems, with a submission deadline of August 1, 2026. The event will take place on September 8–9, 2026, and registration is hosted on the EvalAI Challenge Page.

Chinese artificial intelligence-related stocks surged after CSRC Chairman Wu Qing announced regulatory reforms to accelerate technological self-sufficiency. The measures, unveiled at the Lujiazui Forum, ease IPO standards for AI developers, support advanced sectors like quantum computing, and encourage Hong Kong tech companies to dual-list on the mainland. Hong Kong-listed LLM developers Zhipu and MiniMax jumped over 23%, while onshore chipmakers Cambricon Technology, MetaX, and Moore Threads also posted significant gains, driving the ChiNext Price Index to new highs. Analysts noted the rally highlights a stark divergence, with non-AI sectors remaining in a bear market.