Following Zhongji Xuchuang, the second trillion-dollar company of the year has been born.

Today, June 22nd, Knowledge Atlas (智谱) opened sharply higher and continued to surge, at one point gaining over 42%, propelling it into the trillion-dollar club with a latest market capitalization of HK$1.1 trillion. In just a few months since its listing, its market value has inadvertently multiplied by 20 times.

This surge is underpinned by an unprecedented wave of AI-driven wealth creation. Surprisingly, half of Knowledge Atlas's employees hold shares, and agreements from earlier years are now gradually turning into real wealth. Rough calculations suggest these employees hold an average stock market value of approximately HK$100 million each.

The notion that "joining a good company is the best investment" has now become a concrete reality.

Meanwhile, in Beijing's Haidian District, where Knowledge Atlas is headquartered, the next trillion-dollar company, Cambricon (寒武纪), is on the horizon. This brings to mind last week's announcement by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) supporting five regions, including Beijing Haidian, in creating the first batch of capital market technology finance practice models. This region has already positioned itself at the forefront of global industrial competition.

A Twentyfold Surge

A trillion-dollar company has risen in Beijing.

The dramatic surge of Knowledge Atlas is astonishing. The story began a few days ago on June 17th, when the company launched and open-sourced its new flagship large model, GLM-5.2. This model is specifically designed for long-range task capabilities, enabling AI to work continuously for hours like a human and autonomously complete large-scale projects, moving beyond just instant Q&A.

Soon after, in multiple authoritative evaluations like FrontierSWE and Terminal-Bench, GLM-5.2's performance was only about 1%–4% behind the current strongest overseas model, Claude Opus4.8, ranking as the highest-performing open-source model.

A highly viral moment occurred when someone asked on a foreign social platform, "When is China's large model expected to reach the level of Anthropic's Fable?" Elon Musk replied, "Probably in Q1 2027." However, Knowledge Atlas founder Tang Jie responded, "It won't take that long."

This exchange was laden with meaning.

Consequently, on June 22nd, various sentiments erupted completely. Knowledge Atlas opened high and continued to climb, with its stock price repeatedly hitting new all-time highs, peaking at HK$2,980 before retracing slightly. At the time of writing, its market capitalization still exceeds HK$1 trillion.

This scene is somewhat surreal.

Recall that in January of this year, Knowledge Atlas officially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange with an issue price of HK$116.20 per share. On its debut, its market capitalization exceeded HK$55 billion. Despite bearing the光环 of "the world's first large model stock," its first-day performance was not particularly impressive.

Unexpectedly, the story quickly reversed. Since then, Knowledge Atlas has repeatedly released new models, each time刷新ing the state-of-the-art (SOTA). This has been followed by waves of投票 from investors.

Thus, Knowledge Atlas has presented the most magical spectacle of the AI era: it took five months to grow from a market cap of HK$50 billion to HK$500 billion; and only one month to突破 HK$1 trillion from HK$500 billion.

Super Returns

A wave of new wealthy individuals has emerged here.

Amidst this prosperity, the winners are becoming clear.

As is well known, the story of Knowledge Atlas began in Beijing's Haidian District. As early as 1996, Tsinghua University's Department of Computer Science established the Knowledge Engineering Group (KEG), which was among the early pioneers in China for natural language processing and knowledge graph research. More than two decades later, to maximize the value of scientific research achievements, Tang Jie, Zhang Peng, Liu Debing, and others founded Knowledge Atlas, setting up the company in Haidian, right within the Tsinghua Science Park.

Two months ago, Knowledge Atlas also announced plans to acquire assets related to the Diamond Building in Haidian District, Beijing, for approximately 360 million yuan for office use. Throughout its journey, the company has never left this area.

Alongside the soaring stock price, Haidian has also given birth to a group of multi-millionaires and even billionaires.

Corporate records show that the current employee持股 platforms of Knowledge Atlas, Huihui and Zhideng, hold 7.53% and 5.18% of the company's shares respectively, corresponding to market values exceeding HK$80 billion and HK$55 billion.

According to previous information, Huihui has 426 limited partners, all current and former employees of Knowledge Atlas; while Zhideng has 25 limited partners, all current employees and advisors of the company. In both platforms, the average per capita持股 value has already reached the level of over HK$100 million.

However, according to the ESG report released by Knowledge Atlas not long ago, the total number of employee departures in 2025 was 445, with a turnover rate of 28.64%. Among them, some may have already missed out on this wealth.

It's hard not to感慨 that life's reversals often hinge on one or two crucial choices.

Of course, the investors behind the company have also reaped substantial rewards. Prior to its IPO, Knowledge Atlas completed a total of 8 funding rounds, raising over 8.3 billion yuan, with backing from more than 50 institutional shareholders. Following the order in the prospectus, these include venture capital institutions such as CAS Star, Huakong Technology Transfer Co., Ltd., Tongzhi Investment, Dachen Caizhi, Huakong Fund, Legend Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, Today Capital, Lightspeed China Partners, Shunwei Capital, Sequoia Capital China, Hillhouse, Yunhui Capital, China Merchants Capital, Prosperity7, 5G Fund, Zhuhai Science and Technology Industry Group, Zhongguancun Science City, Ceyuan Capital, Lenovo Capital, and others; industrial capital from companies like Meituan, Ant Group, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Kingsoft, BOSS Zhipin, TAL Education Group; as well as local state-owned assets from Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Tianjin, Hangzhou, and other places.

Following Knowledge Atlas, Beijing's next trillion-dollar company is on its way. Currently, Cambricon's latest market capitalization has exceeded 900 billion yuan and is冲刺ing towards the trillion-yuan mark.

The Haidian Revelation

China's Urban Industrial Competition

Not long ago, Wang Huiwen, after reviewing his investment portfolio, discovered:

"Draw a square框 north of Tsinghua, south of Peking University, east of Xueyuan Road, and north of Dazhongsi. So far, projects落ing within this框 have performed far better than those outside. Moreover, the ones I missed out on—DeepSeek, Knowledge Atlas, Lovart, Emochi—are also within this框."

This is a portrayal of the explosive growth of Haidian's AI industry. Over the past few decades, this area has not only nurtured several top universities and research institutions but has also successively capitalized on three waves of technological浪潮: computers, the internet, and the mobile internet following the reform and opening-up. Today, Haidian, accounting for only 2.6% of Beijing's land area, generates over a quarter of the city's GDP.

Available data shows that in 2025, the regional GDP of Haidian District was nearly 1.37 trillion yuan, with the financial industry's added value reaching 112.57 billion yuan, growing at 8.6%. In the first quarter of this year, the growth rate of the financial industry's added value further increased to 12.3%, 5 percentage points higher than the GDP growth rate. Additionally, the district集聚s approximately 1,600 various financial institutions and 435 private equity investment management firms.

Quietly, a financial service system covering the entire lifecycle of enterprises has clearly emerged in Haidian. What has left a deep impression on the venture capital circle is Haidian's long-term cultivation of patient capital. Recall that in February of this year, Haidian fired the first shot of the year—jointly launching the Zhongguancun Science City Technology Growth Fund IV and the Zhongguancun Science City Technology Achievement Transformation Fund, with a combined scale of up to 10 billion yuan. Among them, the Zhongguancun Science City Technology Growth Fund has累计ly established four phases with a total scale of 30 billion yuan. By adhering to the principle of "investing early, investing small, investing long-term, and investing in hard technology," the Growth Fund has累计ly leveraged over 85 billion yuan in social capital, with fiscal funds achieving nearly a 10-fold放大 at the commitment level.

Simultaneously, Haidian is also continuously引入ing national-level long-term capital. It is reported that during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, Haidian successfully introduced the National Social Security Fund's Zhongguancun Independent Innovation Special Fund, the first special fund in China solely funded by the National Council for Social Security Fund as a single LP. It also introduced百亿-level central and state-owned enterprise funds such as the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, the Beijing Commercial Aerospace and Low-altitude Economy Industry Investment Fund, and the Chengtong Science and Technology Innovation Investment Fund. Furthermore, it promoted comprehensive cooperation with the financial asset investment companies of the five major state-owned banks,落地ing six AIC funds with a total pilot fund scale突破ing 4 billion yuan.

All these efforts culminated in a milestone moment last week when the CSRC announced support for five regions, including Beijing Haidian, to create the first batch of capital market technology finance practice models.

Looking ahead, this is also a microcosm of China's urban industrial competition.

Entering the AI era, many cities with strong historical industrial foundations are experiencing爆发 today. Just as Hefei has become an industrial dark horse凭借 ChangXin Memory Technologies; and cities like Shanghai, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Wuhan, Chengdu... The industrial landscape of Chinese cities is quietly undergoing a qualitative transformation.

In this race of追赶, the vast星辰大海 of Chinese technology is being illuminated one city after another.