Technology Author：EqualOcean News Updated 1 hour ago (GMT+8)

Zhipu AI（智谱）reported first-half 2026 revenue of CNY 953.9 million, up 399.7% year on year and already above its CNY 724 million full-year revenue for 2025. The result was driven by its cloud-based open platform and API business, which generated CNY 825.2 million, up 2,735.7%, and accounted for 86.5% of total revenue.

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The figures mark a sharp shift away from project-based deployments toward usage-based Model-as-a-Service revenue. The company’s cloud business had represented only 15.2% of revenue a year earlier. By contrast, total localized-deployment revenue fell 20.5% to CNY 128.7 million.

A key distinction is that CNY 67 million was revenue from enterprise general large-model products, not the full local-deployment business. Zhipu also generated CNY 55.6 million from enterprise AI agents, helping lift total local-deployment revenue above that figure.

The company reported that its MaaS/API gross margin improved to 24.6% from negative territory a year earlier, while inference cost per token had fallen about 80% from the start of 2026. It also said token calls on its platform had increased more than 40-fold by the end of August.

Losses remain substantial. Net loss narrowed 12.1% to CNY 2.07 billion, but adjusted net loss rose 12.1% to CNY 1.96 billion. The results therefore show real progress in revenue scale and monetization, but not yet a clear profitability inflection point.

For China’s foundation-model sector, Zhipu’s results offer tangible evidence that cloud APIs can become a primary revenue channel. Whether this model becomes durable will depend on sustained enterprise demand, infrastructure costs and the company’s ability to improve margins while competing in a rapidly changing domestic and global AI market.

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