Zhipu’s shares surged as much as 35 percent in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region on Wednesday, showing that investors remained upbeat about the company’s agentic AI prospects despite losses in 2025.

Chief Executive Officer Zhang Peng said he expects “exponential growth” for his cloud-based models business, revealing his company is benchmarking against Anthropic PBC on commercialization during a post-earnings call with reporters on Tuesday.

Zhipu’s shares rose their most since late February, despite reporting a 60 percent surge in net losses. Revenue more than doubled but just missed analysts’ average projections. That caps a meteoric ascent that took its market value past some of the Chinese mainland’s biggest tech incumbents including Baidu Inc.

The Beijing-based company sells cloud-based access to its models and helps clients build customized AI solutions.

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JP Morgan analyst Olivia Xu noted that demand for Zhipu’s service continues to accelerate while its token price increased by 83 percent year-to-date, a sign that the company’s growth is driven by its competitiveness as its customers are paying for quality and reliability.

The mainland AI firm’s revenue climbed to 724.3 million yuan ($105 million) last year, missing an average analyst estimate of 756 million yuan. Net loss for the same period expanded to 4.7 billion yuan, while analysts were expecting only 3.76 billion yuan.

The results are the first for the firm, officially known as Knowledge Atlas Technology JSC Ltd, since it raised $558 million in its Hong Kong initial public offering at the start of the year.

The growing losses underscored the hyper-competitive nature of the mainland AI arena, where newcomers like Zhipu vie with incumbents like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd for customers, talent, and computing resources — often triggering price wars.

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Rival MiniMax Group Inc — which went public in Hong Kong one day after Zhipu — earlier reported a 159 percent surge in its revenue for 2025 to $79 million, as losses also widened. Shares of the twin AI model makers have more than quintupled since their debuts, surpassing mainland internet heavyweights like Baidu and Kuaishou Technology in market capitalization.

Zhipu last month released its latest flagship large language model, GLM-5, designed to improve coding and long-form agentic tasks. The model was designed to support domestic chips for inference, including Huawei Technologies Co’s Ascend processors.

The company is planning a second listing in Shanghai’s Star Market, and has hired Guotai Haitong Securities Co and China International Capital Corp to advise on the float, according to a February filing.