Z.ai nears $1bn in annual sales, a first for an independent Chinese AI firm

What's the deal? Z.ai (formerly Zhipu AI), the company behind the open-source GLM models, is on track to become the first independent Chinese AI firm with roughly $1bn in annual sales, according to Bloomberg. It's a commercialisation milestone rather than a booked full-year result — the figure leans partly on annualised recurring revenue (a run-rate snapshot) and the company remains lossmaking.

The numbers. Z.ai's 2025 revenue was about 724m yuan (~$100m), up 132% year on year. JP Morgan projects revenue of about 4.6bn yuan in 2026, rising to 30.9bn yuan by 2028 — the year it expects the company to turn its first profit. Annualised recurring revenue from its open API platform has reached 1.7bn yuan, up roughly sixtyfold in a single year.

How it makes money. A large share comes from on-premises deployments for state-owned enterprises and financial institutions, alongside a fast-growing cloud business and the momentum-driving API side. Much of the revenue leans on state-owned buyers, which blurs the line between commercial demand and state support.

Why it matters. Z.ai is monetising at scale while open-sourcing its strongest models — including GLM-5.2, which anyone can download and run for free — an approach that confounds the Western playbook and that founder Jie TangDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has publicly defended. Approaching $1bn in sales marks a different order of maturity from the pure cash-burn most labs — American and Chinese — still live in, though cheap Chinese models continue to undercut each other and rivals such as AnthropicDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → on price. The company is now valued at roughly $112bn after a rally of well over 1,000% since its January listing.

Read more: The Next Web · Bloomberg