Z.ai, Maker of GLMs, Makes $142 Million in Revenue at a $71 Billion Market Value
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden
Z.ai said first-half revenue jumped to about $142 million, but it still lost $308 million. The market’s valuing it at about $71 billion anyway, which is a lot of faith.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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Z.ai just put real numbers on a story the AI world has been watching for months. The Beijing-based company, better known as Zhipu and the maker of the GLM family, reported its first half-year results as a listed company after going public in Hong Kong earlier this year as the first pure-play foundation model company to do so.
Revenue in the first six months rose about 400% to 953.89 million yuan, or roughly $141.8 million. The loss also narrowed, but only to 2.07 billion yuan, about $308 million. That still leaves Z.ai deep in the red, with losses running at around 2.2 times revenue.
The problem is that the market wanted more. Bloomberg said analysts had expected 1.35 billion yuan in revenue on average, which means Z.ai fell about 29% short. The company is getting squeezed in China’s AI price war, where it is up against names such as DeepSeek and Moonshot AI.
And the valuation is still doing Olympic-level gymnastics. Z.ai’s market capitalization on the Hong Kong exchange is 556.42 billion Hong Kong dollars, or about $71.4 billion. Against half-year revenue, that works out to a price-to-sales ratio of about 252 if annualized. The company would need annual revenue of about $3.6 billion to get down to a P/S of 20 at the same market value.
The stock has already had a wild ride. It trades around 60% below its summer high, but still roughly ten times above its IPO price. The listing raised $558 million, and last month the company added another $4 billion through a share placement, which suggests the spending won’t be slowing down anytime soon.
On the product side, Z.ai confirmed it was behind Ox Alpha, the model that had been attracting developer attention before its origin was known. Officially called GLM-5.3-Flash, it is priced at $0.15 per million input tokens. Z.ai also said earlier GLM-5.2 beat several leading U.S. systems on key benchmarks, before Moonshot AI moved ahead with Kimi K3 and took the lead across the major benchmarks.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the modern AI business in one neat mess: huge attention, huge spending, and valuations that only make sense if everyone keeps pretending revenue is a side quest. Z.ai isn’t being punished for being small; it’s being judged against a market that has already priced in miracles. That usually ends badly for someone.
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