Zhipu AI (Z.ai) First-Half 2026 Revenue Surges Nearly 400% to $134M as API Business Grows 27-Fold

Zhipu AI (Z.ai), the Beijing-based large-language-model developer, reported first-half 2026 revenue of 954 million yuan (~$134 million), up 399.7% year-on-year, in results covered by Caixin Global on September 1. The growth was driven almost entirely by its open-platform and API business, which surged 27.4-fold to 825 million yuan and now accounts for 86.5% of total revenue, up from just 15.2% a year earlier, as enterprise customers shifted from buying general-purpose models to consuming Zhipu's GLM models via cloud API. Annualized recurring revenue reached $1.6 billion as of August, roughly double rival MiniMax's, while token calls on the platform rose more than 40-fold since early 2026 across 7.4 million enterprise and developer users. Net loss narrowed 12.1% to 2.07 billion yuan, and the cloud-deployment business achieved gross profitability at a 24.6% margin versus -0.4% a year earlier — evidence Zhipu is beginning to convert scale into unit economics even as it continues to operate large training and inference clusters on domestically produced Huawei Ascend chips amid US export restrictions.