Chinese AI Model Firm Z.ai’s API Sales Surge in First Half

Chinese AI firm Z.ai’s revenue in the first half jumped nearly fivefold from a year earlier to 954 million yuan ($142 million), boosted by skyrocketing sales of cloud-based AI model services.

Z.ai, whose stock is listed in Hong Kong, said its “open platform and API revenue,” which includes the sales of its models through application programming interfaces and other services such as coding plans, surged more than 28 times to 825 million yuan. Its loss for the period narrowed 12% to 2.07 billion yuan.

The fast growth in API sales in the first half reflects the popularity of the company’s GLM-5.1 and GLM-5.2 models, which delivered strong coding capabilities at affordable prices. Last month, Z.ai released its new-generation model, GLM-5.3, which is challenging U.S. frontier models in coding and agentic tasks.

But Z.ai is also leading an intensifying price war among Chinese AI models, which could affect its revenue and margins in the second half of this year. Last week, the company launched GLM-5.3 Flash, a low-cost model that only charges $0.15 for input and $0.50 for output per 1 million tokens.