Nicholas Gordon,
Fortune’s Asia editor, filling in for Allie Garfinkle.
Hong Kong is back.
IPOs in the Chinese city raised almost
$14 billion in the first quarter of the year, a jump of almost 490% year-on-year. That number keeps Hong Kong at the top of the world’s IPO league tables, building on last year’s stellar performance of
$35 billion raised over more than 100 new listings.
Before, Hong Kong’s success was all about secondary listings. Chinese giants like Midea and CATL, already listed on mainland Chinese exchanges, went to Hong Kong to tap the city’s connections to international capital.
But in 2026, the Hong Kong story is all about AI. MiniMax and Knowledge Atlas (better known as
Z.ai), two frontier AI labs, Biren Technology, a chip design company, and Insilico Medicine, an AI drug discovery company, are just some of the standout listings from the past few months.
There’s more to come: Manycore, a spatial design company and one of the Hangzhou-based “Little Dragons” will list in Hong Kong this week; Victory Giant, which makes
printed circuit boards, is also raising funds in the city. Other AI companies reportedly considering IPOs are Moonshot AI, the developer of Kimi; Rokid, a manufacturer of smart glasses; and Kunlunxin, the chip unit of Baidu.
Hong Kong and Beijing are “essentially trying to do for Chinese AI what
Nasdaq did for the internet,” says Drew Bernstein, co-chairman of Marcum Asia, an accounting firm.
Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, the city’s stock exchange operator, calculated that companies that debuted in 2025 had
an average first-day return of 40%. But that’s nothing compared to MiniMax and
Z.ai, whose shares have jumped by over 500% and 700% respectively from their IPOs in early January. That’s despite both startups reporting less than $100 million in revenue while still losing hundreds of millions of dollars.
Investors have grown more bullish on China’s AI sector even since DeepSeek shook up the AI narrative last year. “We believe that China is the big winner in this tech war for a number of reasons: valuation, wider adoption of AI, an advantage in power generation,” Mohit Kumar, Jefferies’s chief macro strategist,
told me last month. (Be sure to check out
my recent explainer on what’s happening in Chinese AI!)
To be sure, “Hong Kong doesn’t quite replicate what a U.S. listing offers,” says Bernstein, who helps Asian companies explore U.S. IPOs. New York’s exchanges offer much deeper pools of capital, and one expects that Chinese issuers might prefer to list there if not for the geopolitics. Chinese companies are still raising lots of money on both U.S. and mainland Chinese exchanges. And there are also several bumper U.S. IPOs on the horizon—think
SpaceX and OpenAI—that are likely to dwarf whatever’s in the pipeline for Hong Kong.
Still there’s no question it’s a big shift from previous years, when a regulatory crackdown from Beijing made Chinese tech stocks anathema to global investors. “China went from
uninvestable to unavoidable in a short period of time,” Bernstein adds.
Nicholas Gordon
X: @nickrigordonEmail: nicholas.gordon@fortune.comSubmit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter
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