hina’s push to take its AI startups public is gaining momentum.

MiniMax Group, a Chinese developer of multimodal, large language models, raised $618.6 million USD in its Hong Kong IPO after pricing shares at the top of its range, Reuters reported. The company sold 29.2 million shares and plans to allocate most of the proceeds to research and development over the next five years. Trading is expected to begin this week.

The listing is one of the first major public debuts for a Chinese AI startup building frontier models. While U.S. players like OpenAI and Anthropic remain private, China is pushing its AI firms into public markets earlier. Hong Kong is becoming a key venue for Chinese AI companies due to its business-friendly environment, a shift unfolding amid U.S. export controls on Nvidia GPUs to train the models.

“The wave of IPO approvals does suggest a shift in accelerating AI startup development through capital market access,” Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at tech research firm Omdia, told Reuters in late December. “While the U.S. maintains a lead in frontier compute and model performance due to chip superiority, access to public funding helps China build a more self-sufficient AI ecosystem.”

The momentum started with chips. In January, Chinese chip firms Biren, OmniVision, and Shanghai Biren Technology all completed IPOs in Hong Kong and saw strong debuts, helping set a floor for investor appetite. Kunlunxin, Baidu’s AI chip unit spinoff, filed for a Hong Kong IPO that could raise up to $2 billion, while Montage Technology is preparing its own offering that could reach $1 billion.

Chinese chip firms are also turning to their home turf. In December, Moore Threads, often described as China’s Nvidia, and MetaX Integrated Circuits both held IPOs on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, drawing strong interest from retail and institutional buyers.