The market capitalisation of Hong Kong-listed artificial intelligence pioneer Zhipu AI surpassed HK$1 trillion (US$128 billion) on Monday, fuelled by investor optimism as the company goes head-to-head with its American rivals.

Shares of Zhipu, which trades under the name Knowledge Atlas Technology, skyrocketed as much as 42 per cent on Monday morning to a peak of HK$2,980.

The surge follows the release of Zhipu’s open-source GLM-5.2 model last week. Featuring a massive 1-million-token context window, the new model ranked second globally as of Monday on the Code Arena list for front-end web development tasks, trailing only Anthropic’s flagship Claude Fable 5.

In a recent exchange on social-media platform X, tech billionaire Elon Musk estimated that a Chinese AI model capable of matching Claude Fable 5 would likely arrive in the first quarter of next year. Zhipu founder Tang Jie responded that it “won’t take that long”.

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