Z.ai (formerly Zhipu AI)

Stories

China's Z.AI raises $5 billion in share placement and bond sale

As of September 2026: Raised $5B in new capital

Beijing-based AI company Z.AI raised $5 billion this week, splitting the proceeds between a $2 billion share placement and $3 billion zero-coupon convertible bonds. The funds will go primarily to computing power and next-generation model research.

Updated Sep 13

Alibaba releases Qwen3.8-Max as open weights, undercutting US model pricing

New Capabilities

As of August 2026: Released GLM-5.3, delayed its weights over unplanned cybersecurity capability

Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max weights landed on Hugging Face on August 12, nine days after the API launch. The download is smaller than promised: it skips the 1-million-token context and image input of the hosted model, and the 27-billion-parameter version has not shipped.

Updated Aug 14