By Tracy Qu and Raffaele Huang

Alibaba-backed MiniMax has confidentially filed for an initial public offering in Hong Kong, according to people familiar with the matter, signaling the onset of a race among China's generative AI startups to tap public markets.

Shanghai-based MiniMax, which also counts Tencent as an investor, was valued at around $4 billion after a recent financing round and is targeting a stock-market debut as soon as this year, one of the people said.

The company has also filed its Hong Kong listing plan with China's securities regulator for review, one of the people said.

It is the latest sign that the city is regaining its appeal as an IPO venue as Chinese technology companies seeking to raise capital increasingly turn away from the U.S., deterred by geopolitical uncertainty and increased scrutiny from Washington. According to Dealogic data, Hong Kong raised $13.66 billion from more than 40 IPOs in the first six months of the year, surpassing the total amount raised in the whole of 2024.

Efforts by the city's stock exchange to attract listings and Chinese authorities' continued policy support have also helped.

Meanwhile, at home, Beijing has been promoting its artificial-intelligence industry with state funding and policy stimulus, including encouraging state-owned companies to hasten the adoption of AI.

Beijing-based Zhipu AI, another large-language-model developer, has also been preparing for a public listing. The company has hired banks but is still weighing the listing location, people familiar with the process said. Zhipu also counts Alibaba and Tencent as investors.

The rush to tap Hong Kong's capital markets has also gained momentum as competition intensifies in the AI space, especially after the success of China's DeepSeek, which surprised the industry with its affordable yet powerful open-source models. Some companies that initially invested in training large language models are now shifting their focus to developing AI applications.

MiniMax, founded in 2021, has developed multiple generative AI models that power its companion apps and AI agents used by content creators. Outside China, it has operated a popular chatbot called Talkie that competes with Character.AI in the U.S.

In June, MiniMax released a reasoning model called M1 that it said outperformed an equivalent offering from DeepSeek. MiniMax said its model requires only around 30% of the computing power that DeepSeek's R1 needs for some reasoning workloads.

MiniMax's model tied for 18th place in the latest ranking on Chatbot Arena, a popular platform that rates model performance.

Write to Tracy Qu at tracy.qu@wsj.com and Raffaele Huang at raffaele.huang@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 16, 2025 01:56 ET (05:56 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.