China's Moonshot AI to explore Shanghai and Hong Kong IPOs

Moonshot AI is weighing a second route to the public markets through Shanghai’s STAR Market, in addition to the Hong Kong IPO it is already considering. The move could give the Beijing-based startup behind Kimi K3 access to billions of dollars in capital to fund the costly training of frontier AI models.

The plans were first reported by the South China Morning Post on Thursday, citing two people familiar with the matter.

Moonshot plans second listing

Moonshot has confidentially filed paperwork for a Hong Kong IPO and is targeting a listing as early as the first quarter of 2027. One source said the company began exploring a mainland listing after a July meeting with its financial backers, where they discussed arrangements for the IPO.

Hong Kong’s AI stocks have struggled to maintain momentum in recent weeks, even though the stock market has a huge amount of companies seeking to go public. It is therefore not surprising that there is a growing interest in Shanghai’s STAR Market.

The interest is seen as a response to Hong Kong’s stock weakness, and the market offers AI firms another potential route to the public markets.

Moonshot’s $50 billion valuation

Moonshot is running a final financing round ahead of the listing that could value it at about $50 billion. Reuters separately valued the Hong Kong raise at about $3 billion. These are high numbers, especially for a company that was founded just three years ago.

Moonshot was established in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, and the startup’s rapid rise has been driven majorly by Kimi, the company’s family of AI models and consumer apps, which has helped make Moonshot a prominent name in China’s generative AI race.

Moonshot released Kimi K3 in July, describing the model as the world’s largest open-weight AI model, with 2.8 trillion parameters. Demand has been so strong for Kimi K3 that its available computing capacity has come under significant strain, according to Moonshot.

Shanghai fills up with AI names

If Moonshot does pursue a mainland listing, it is likely to target the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s Science and Technology Innovation Board, known as the STAR Market, and talks with the exchange could start soon, according to the SCMP’s sources.

Rivals Z.ai, formerly Zhipu, and MiniMax are also working on STAR Market listings, and the board’s waiting list also includes DeepSeek and Yangtze Memory Technologies. Recent additions to the Shanghai stock exchange include ChangXin Memory Technologies and robotics firm Unitree.

Moonshot is said to be in discussions with Microsoft, Amazon and Google over revenue-sharing agreements that would allow the U.S. cloud providers host its AI models.

Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.