MiniMax shares surge after joining Hong Kong Stock Connect
Shares of Chinese AI specialist MiniMax surged Thursday after the company was added to a program linking Hong Kong and Chinese mainland stock markets. The stock jumped as much as 22.8% to HK$311.60 ($39.73) during the trading day, pushing the company’s market capitalization back above HK$100 billion. With the addition, Hong Kong-listed MiniMax joins Luxshare Precision Industry Co. Ltd. and Chaozhou Three-Circle Group Co. Ltd. as the latest mainland companies to be included in the channel. MiniMax’s inclusion opened the AI company’s stock to support from mainland buyers at a time when its valuation had come under pressure from an immense share unlock and escalating price war in China over large language models.
Unitree IPO opens with bids implying up to 55 billion yuan valuation
China’s Unitree Robotics opened investor book-building for its Shanghai initial public offering on Wednesday, setting up a crucial market test for one of the country’s hottest embodied AI bets as some institutional indications pointed to a valuation well above its target. The Hangzhou-based company said in its latest prospectus on July 30 that it plans to raise 4.2 billion yuan ($620 million) by selling at least 10% of its shares, implying a valuation of about 42 billion yuan. A mutual fund manager told Caixin some bids in the Wednesday inquiry process suggested a valuation closer to 55 billion yuan. Unitree’s market debut is widely seen by investors and industry insiders as a test of how far public markets will support the lofty private-market valuations attached to China’s humanoid and embodied AI sector.
U.S. drafts ban on Chinese optical modules, exposing mutual supply chain risks
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is reportedly drafting a ban on imports of Chinese-made optical modules and other data-center components, a move that sent shares of North American suppliers sharply higher. Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing sources, that U.S. officials are aiming to roll out the import restrictions within this year. After the report, shares of U.S. optical-communications companies rose in premarket trading: Coherent Corp. gained more than 10%, Lumentum Holdings Inc. climbed over 9% and Marvell Technology Inc. advanced more than 8%. The proposed curbs could disrupt supply chains for AI infrastructure. Chinese manufacturers currently supply more than half of the world’s key high-speed optical interconnects, which are critical to AI data centers.
Xiaomi open-sources embodied base model
Xiaomi Corp. officially open-sourced its embodied base model Xiaomi-Robotics-1 on Wednesday, according to a post on the company’s official Weibo account. The open-source release covers the entire process from real-machine post-training to model deployment and provides benchmark evaluation codes. Xiaomi-Robotics-1 was released on July 16, with CEO Lei Jun noting that the model had preliminarily verified the scaling law effect in the field of embodied base models.
