Chinese AI startup MiniMax Group spearheaded six Hong Kong listings worth HK$16.7 billion launched on Wednesday, exchange filings showed, as AI and chipmakers power the city's equity markets comeback and set the tone for 2026.

Hong Kong has raised US$36.5 billion from 114 new listings in 2025, for its strongest year since 2021, and more than triple the roughly $11.3 billion raised in 2024, LSEG data shows.

MiniMax seeks to raise up to HK$4.19 billion from 25.4 million shares priced in a range of HK$151.00 to HK$165.00 each, ahead of a January 9 debut.

Semiconductor specialists OmniVision Integrated Circuits and GigaDevice Semiconductor have also started bookbuilding for their IPOs, aiming to raise about US$600 million each.

"The wave of IPO approvals does suggest a shift in accelerating AI startup development through capital market access," said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at tech research firm Omdia.

"While the U.S maintains a lead in frontier compute and model performance due to chip superiority, access to public funding helps China build resilient, self-sufficient AI ecosystem with minimal impact from tech restrictions."

MiniMax is among the first batch of Chinese large language model developers to seek a public listing in Hong Kong.

Founded in early 2022 by former SenseTime executive Yan Junjie, it develops multimodal AI models, such as MiniMax M1, Hailuo-02, Speech-02 and Music-01, which can process text, audio, images, video and music.

The IPO would value MiniMax at about US$6.5 billion.

Rival firm Knowledge Atlas Technology, or Zhipu AI, launched its offering a day earlier, seeking to raise HK$4.35 billion at a valuation of HK$51.2 billion.

AI STOCKS BOOM

Investor appetite for Chinese AI has climbed since the rise of DeepSeek, a homegrown alternative to ChatGPT, and recent moves such as Meta's acquisition of Manus, fuelling expectations of robust deal flow into 2026.

Chinese memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies and Baidu's AI chip unit Kunlunxin are among those seeking to list on either domestic or Hong Kong stock exchanges, Reuters has reported.

This month's onshore IPOs of AI chip firms Moore Threads and MetaX were thousands of times oversubscribed, with their shares hovering far above IPO prices, despite recent pullbacks.

MiniMax has won cornerstone investments from Alibaba, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, China's Boyu and Mirae Asset among others, its IPO prospectus showed.

OmniVision's IPO attracted Boyu Capital's Wildlife Willow, UBS Asset Management Singapore and China Post's PSBC Wealth Management as cornerstone investors, while GigaDevice got commitments from CPE and Yunfeng Capital, their prospectuses showed.

Biotech firm Suzhou Ribo Life Science, cathode copper producer Yunnan Jinxun Resources and logistics company Hongxing Coldchain (Hunan) also launched offers on the last day of 2025.

Proceeds from Wednesday's offerings will fund research and development, product expansion and working capital, the companies' disclosures show.

Semiconductor designer Shanghai Biren Technology (6082) is set to debut on Friday, kicking off new listings in 2026, followed by Zhipu AI, Shanghai Iluvatar CoreX Semiconductor and surgical robotics maker Shenzhen Edge Medical on January 8.

REUTERS

Chinese AI firm MiniMax, others launch Hong Kong IPOs in year-end rush