Zhipu AI

Zhipu AI (智谱AI) is a Chinese AI company founded in 2019 as a spinoff from Tsinghua University, one of China's top research institutions. It develops the GLM (General Language Model) family and is one of China's most prominent and well-capitalized AI labs, competing at the frontier alongside DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax. In January 2026 it became the first large language model company to go public, listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and raising roughly 558 million dollars.

Its flagship line is GLM-5, released in February 2026, followed by the coding-first GLM 5.2 in June 2026 — a mixture-of-experts model with 744 billion total parameters, MIT-licensed open weights, and a context window that reached 1 million tokens. What sets GLM-5 apart is how it was built: entirely on Huawei Ascend chips using the MindSpore framework, with zero NVIDIA dependency — a proof point that frontier-scale models can be trained on fully domestic Chinese hardware despite US export controls. Zhipu now operates its consumer and international platform under the Z.ai brand.

Zhipu AI benefits from its deep connection to Tsinghua University's research ecosystem, which produces many of China's top AI researchers and engineers. The company differentiates through that academic pedigree, its NVIDIA-free training stack, and one of the most permissive open-weights strategies among frontier-scale labs — its models are released under the MIT license and have been downloaded millions of times.