According to Yahoo Finance, Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup Zhipu announced on Tuesday that it has completed its latest round of financing. The company had previously received investments from internet giants such as Alibaba and Tencent last year. The statement revealed that Zhipu's commercial revenue has more than doubled this year.
Zhipu is one of the few AI startups in China valued at several billion dollars and has received significant investments from local tech giants. In May of this year, Saudi Aramco's venture capital division participated in Zhipu's $400 million financing round, raising its valuation to approximately $3 billion.
AI development has rapidly evolved into a capital-intensive "arms race." Companies like Meta and Microsoft spend tens of billions of dollars each year on NVIDIA's cutting-edge hardware. They are betting that enterprises will begin allocating more budgets to AI services and computing capabilities. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Hu Yuzhen believes this will be one of the major trends in AI development by 2025.
Hu Yuzhen stated, "Based on our discussions at the SC24 conference in Atlanta, enterprise clients may start increasing their investments in AI in 2025 after conducting proof-of-concept and development work in 2024. Unlike hyperscale cloud customers focused on investing in infrastructure to train large language models, enterprises may be more focused on fine-tuning models and building inference models, as they seek to achieve profitability or improve productivity through AI spending."
In the AI sector, large tech companies are engaged in fierce investment competition, but startups like Zhipu, with their localized strategies and government support, still have the opportunity to stand out and become significant players in the industry.
