Nvidia China Optics Send Zhipu Shares Up Nearly 900% Since IPO

Chinese AI model developers are back in the spotlight, after Nvidia Corp. NVDA Chief Executive Jensen Huang joined President Donald Trump’s trip to Beijing and fueled investor hopes that China’s leading AI firms could possibly gain wider access to Nvidia’s advanced chips. MiniMax Group Inc. rose about 18%, while Knowledge Atlas Technology Joint Stock Co., known as Zhipu, surged about 37%, as traders treated Huang’s last-minute addition to Trump’s China visit as a potentially meaningful signal ahead of a high-stakes Beijing summit.

The move adds another layer to a trade that has already been building around MiniMax and Zhipu, two companies that have recently dominated China’s version of the global AI rally on optimism around their cost-driven competitiveness. Still, the bigger question remains access to compute. More advanced semiconductors, including Nvidia’s H200 chips, are widely viewed as a key bottleneck for China’s ambitions to build a token-based economy. Jian Shi Cortesi of Gam Investment Management said Zhipu and MiniMax appeared to be moving on the view that Huang’s presence could raise the odds of onshore large language models gaining access to better Nvidia chips, while Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Marvin Chen said the optics point to possible negotiations around Nvidia supplying China again.

That policy backdrop remains complicated. Trump’s team granted H200 licenses several months ago, Nvidia secured Trump’s support for H200 exports in December, and some…