China's AI labs are heading for public markets — and Moonshot AI just became the biggest test case.
Moonshot AI, the Beijing company behind the Kimi chatbot, has completed its final private funding round at a valuation of about $50 billion, according to Bloomberg, up from $31.5 billion this summer and roughly $4.8 billion at the start of the year. The company is now preparing an initial public offering in Hong Kong targeting the first quarter of 2027, which could raise up to $5 billion.
The deal team is set: Bank of America is coordinating, with China International Capital Corp, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman Sachs acting as sponsors, per Bloomberg. Early-look investor meetings were expected to begin this month.
The engine behind the number is Kimi K3, the company's flagship open-weight model, launched in July with 2.8 trillion parameters — making it, by the company's account, the largest open-weight model in the world. Demand was intense enough that Moonshot briefly paused new subscriptions at launch. Its annual recurring revenue has raced from $300 million in June to about $1 billion now, with a $2 billion December target.
But at roughly 50 times current annualized sales, the valuation prices compute and growth, not intelligence. Listed peers offer a cautionary tale: Zhipu and MiniMax, which went public in Hong Kong in January as the world's first publicly traded foundation-model companies, have deflated sharply since their debuts — Zhipu has given back roughly three-quarters of its March peak, per market commentary. Their prospectuses were sobering: heavy losses on thin revenue, with cloud-API margins under pressure.
There are also regulatory clouds. Bloomberg has reported that regulators previously launched data-security investigations into DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, and it is unclear whether that will affect the listing timeline.
Still, the deal would be the largest test yet of what public markets will pay for a Chinese frontier lab — and it lands alongside a packed IPO calendar: DeepSeek is nearing a $12 billion-plus raise ahead of its own early-2027 listing, while Anthropic targets November at up to $2 trillion. Moonshot's backers include Alibaba, Tencent, and China Mobile, and total capital raised now exceeds $5.5 billion.
If the IPO holds its valuation, it reprices the whole Chinese AI stack. If it follows Zhipu and MiniMax downward, it is a different signal entirely — that public investors, unlike private ones, charge full price for physics.