Goldman Sachs initiated coverage on Hong Kong-listed Zhipu with a price target of 1,880 Hong Kong dollars while naming DeepSeek and ByteDance as its other top Chinese AI model picks, citing near-frontier performance and surging enterprise adoption.
Goldman Sachs has identified three preferred Chinese artificial intelligence model companies — Zhipu, DeepSeek, and ByteDance — as the field of Chinese open-source AI narrows toward a critical inflection point in global competition.
The investment bank initiated coverage on Hong Kong-listed Zhipu, also known as Knowledge Atlas, on Friday with a price target of 1,880 Hong Kong dollars, or approximately $239.83. That figure represented nearly 15% upside from the stock's closing price that day.
Zhipu has attracted significant attention in recent weeks after its open-sourced GLM-5.2 model drew comparisons to Anthropic's Fable 5 across several performance benchmarks.
"With its latest GLM5.2 model reaching near-frontier performance that has seen significant ramp-up in domestic enterprise and global SME adoption, we believe its extensive usage by coders will enable Zhipu to sustain high frequency of further model upgrades, and thereby solidify its leading position in enterprise/coding in China," Goldman analysts said in the initiation report.
Despite the bullish price target, Goldman assigned Zhipu a neutral rating. Its two other preferred Chinese AI model companies — DeepSeek and ByteDance — are both privately held, according to a separate Goldman report also released Friday.
Analysts evaluated the models across several factors, including time to market, arena score, valuation, and pricing. ByteDance ranked highest among the group for AI video generation capabilities.
Zhipu's GLM and DeepSeek's models generally outperformed offerings from Alibaba, Tencent, and Minimax, particularly on time-to-market and arena score metrics, the Goldman report said.
The performance divergence has been reflected in Hong Kong market returns. Over the last 60 trading days, Zhipu shares have surged 70%, while Minimax has declined by more than 70%. Alibaba shares have fallen nearly 10% during the same period, and Tencent is down roughly 5%.
"China's AI open-source/open-weight models are reaching a critical point of intelligence performance vs. global proprietary models," the analysts said.
Goldman also flagged computing access as a pivotal variable. "Agentic AI is driving explosive demand for these value-for-money models at the lower-end. Access to computing will be a swing factor, where US/China regulations, balance sheet and inference efficiency are key," the analysts said.
The report comes as U.S.-China technology tensions continue to shape the competitive dynamics of frontier AI development, reinforcing that regulatory constraints on chip exports and cross-border investment could materially influence which models gain lasting market position.
Jay Goldberg is a staff writer at TechEchelon covering technology, markets, and policy. He files the breaking news and deal coverage that move the publication's core desks.
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