A Chinese AI startup most people hadn’t heard of a year ago is now worth more than some publicly traded tech giants, and it’s racing toward a Hong Kong listing that could reshape how investors think about the global AI arms race.

Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based developer behind the Kimi series of AI models, is targeting an IPO filing in the second half of 2026. The company’s valuation has ballooned from roughly $4 billion at the end of 2025 to somewhere between $20 billion and $30 billion in its latest financing round, which pulled in approximately $2 billion.

The model that moved markets

The company released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-weight coding model, on July 17, 2026. The model outperformed…