Z.AI’s first-half revenue soars fivefold on API surge

Large-model AI company Z.AI Co. Ltd. (2513.HK), also known as Zhipu, said on Monday that its revenue rose fivefold year-on-year to 954 million yuan ($142 million) in the first half of 2026. Its loss for the period narrowed 12.1% to 2.07 billion yuan from 2.36 billion yuan a year earlier, while its adjusted net loss widened 12.1% to 1.96 billion yuan from 1.75 billion yuan.

The company’s revenue growth was mainly driven by its open platform and API business, whose revenue surged 27.4 times to 825 million yuan, accounting for 86.5% of the total, up from just 15.2% a year earlier. Revenue from its enterprise-level agents business jumped 304.4% to 55.6 million yuan, while its enterprise-level general-purpose large models segment fell 54.6% to 67 million yuan.

The company said its revenue mix shifted in the first half from on-premise deployment toward API services billed on a per-invocation basis, with coding becoming a key commercialization scenario. Its R&D expenses for the latest six-month period rose 33.6% to about 2.13 billion yuan. As of June, the company’s GLM MaaS platform had more than 5.8 million enterprise and developer users, rising to over 7.4 million as of the announcement date. Z.AI also said it achieved large-scale inference across a cluster of more than 100,000 domestic chips, with unit token inference costs down 80% from the start of the year.

Management said gross margin for the open platform and API business improved by about 25 percentage points year-on-year to 24.6%, as the company continues to expand from coding into higher-value scenarios including agent and co-work.

Z.AI’s shares opened lower on Tuesday but later reversed course to end at HK$1,230 by the midday break, up 2.93%. The stock now trades about nine times higher than its March IPO price.

By Lee Shih Ta

To subscribe to Bamboo Works weekly free newsletter, click here