Zhipu accelerates pivot to domestic chips amid AI boom in China

Zhipu AI CEO Zhang Peng said on Tuesday the company was accelerating its use of domestic Chinese chips to meet a significant rise in computing demand since February.

One of the leading players in China's crowded artificial intelligence sector, Zhipu AI, reported revenue growth of 132% for 2025 in its first results ‌update since raising ⁠HK$4.35 ⁠billion ($554.9 million) in a January listing.

The spinoff from Tsinghua University has drawn attention in Silicon Valley with its latest GLM-5 model, said to match U.S. rivals on several performance metrics.


"The deep optimisation has enabled the GLM series models to achieve inference efficiency on domestic chips that rivals that of the world's leading foreign chips," Zhang said in an earnings call with reporters after releasing annual financial ⁠results.

Zhang said ‌the company has raised its API call pricing by 83% in the first quarter due to surging market demand, with the volume ⁠of such requests surging 400%.

Revenue from its core business ​of on-premise deployment, in which Zhipu sells models for installation ​on clients' local servers, more than doubled to 533.9 million yuan ($77.3 million) in 2025.

Cloud-based revenue from API services sold to enterprises and individuals climbed 292% to 190.4 million yuan.

Zhipu posted a net loss of 4.72 billion yuan for 2025, compared with a loss of 2.96 billion in 2024. Its net adjusted ‌loss for the year was 3.18 billion yuan.

The company has said it expects to reach profitability through revenue growth and improved ​operating efficiency, without ​giving a timeframe.

The results ⁠come amid growing competition in China's AI sector, as companies race to release updated models and step up marketing.

Zhipu, also known as Knowledge Atlas Technology, competes with ​startups such as MiniMax, Moonshot AI and DeepSeek, as well as internet giants ByteDance and Alibaba.

Rival MiniMax posted a net loss of $1.87 billion for 2025.

Zhipu has been expanding abroad, particularly in Southeast Asia, but China remains its primary market.

($1=6.9074 Chinese yuan renminbi)

($1=7.8393 Hong Kong dollars)