New developments in the large model race: The Dark Side of the Moon and others compete for IPO, with the core of competition shifting to capital valuation

The Chinese large model industry is undergoing a critical shift, with the capital market becoming a new battleground for leading companies. Previously focused on deepening their presence in the primary market, Yang Zhilin’s team has recently been reported to have engaged with investment banks like CICC and Goldman Sachs to assess the feasibility of a listing in Hong Kong. This move sharply contrasts with their three-month-old statement of “no urgency to go public,” reflecting a deep transformation in the industry’s valuation logic.

According to multiple investors close to the transactions, Jieyue Xingchen is also accelerating capital operations, not only initiating a new round of financing with a valuation of about $6 billion but also rumored to plan a listing in Hong Kong within the year. Behind the competition for the title of “the third large model company to go public” lies the valuation myth created by Zhipu AI and MiniMax after their listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange earlier this year—both companies saw their market value exceed HK$300 billion within three months, with share prices soaring 3 to 5 times from their issuance price, setting the first public pricing benchmark for the industry.

New signals from the capital market are reshaping the industry ecosystem. The clear valuation ranges provided by the secondary market have directly raised pricing expectations in the primary market. For instance, the latest financing round for Moonlight’s Dark Side has a pre-money valuation reaching $17 to $18 billion, achieving a threefold increase compared to last year’s $4.3 billion. The company has set its future market value target in line with Anthropic, aiming for a long-term goal of $38 billion based on the latter’s $380 billion valuation. This valuation leap is not an isolated event; the fundraising scale for Hong Kong IPOs in Q1 2026 surged 300% year-on-year, with the technology and AI sectors becoming core drivers.

Substantial breakthroughs in business models provide support for the uplift in valuations. After the release of the K2.5 model, Moonlight’s Dark Side saw its revenue surpass the total for all of 2025 within just 20 days, proving that large models have a stable monetization capability. The key turning point lies in the restructuring of demand: shifting from low-frequency conversations to high-frequency task execution, where a single complex task can be broken down into hundreds of sub-tasks, driving exponential growth in call frequency and token consumption. OpenRouter data shows that the consumption of tokens from Chinese models has already exceeded 60%, with Kimi K2.5 ranking seventh globally with a monthly consumption of 30 trillion.

The capital market is redefining the valuation assessment system for AI companies. Li Rui, Executive Director of Qishijie Technology, points out that the industry’s characteristics are shifting from technological organizations to tradable assets, with sustainable revenue capability, clear growth paths, and public market liquidity becoming core indicators. For Moonlight’s Dark Side, which has over 20 billion in cash on the books, the core value of going public is no longer financing, but rather transforming primary market valuations into public market pricing, providing a path for team incentives and establishing a capital circulation system for continuous resource acquisition.

This transformation has given rise to a unique “lock-in effect.” Companies that go public first will occupy pricing power in the industry, while latecomers will be compared to this coordinate system in financing pricing, talent acquisition, and market perception. The accelerated sprint of Moonlight’s Dark Side and Jieyue Xingchen is, in essence, a response to the new competitive rules—in a race characterized by rapid technological iterations and concentrated capital investments, the sooner a company can gain market pricing power, the better it can convert short-term advantages into long-term barriers.

The current competitive dimension has fundamentally shifted. While technological strength remains an industry threshold, the variables determining a company’s upper limit are turning toward capital operation capabilities. Higher valuations bring stronger financing capabilities, which in turn support larger-scale computing power investments and model iterations, creating a positive cycle. This change indicates that the large model competition has entered a new stage of “market recognition,” with capital pricing power reshaping the industry landscape.