With the sound of the gong at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for MiniMax (00100.HK) on January 9, Shanghai set a new record of "five AI companies listing in a single month."
Over the past 30 days, five Shanghai-based AI firms—BIREN TECH, Metax Integrated Circuits (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., ILUVATAR COREX, Days Technology, and MiniMax—spanning from GPUs to AI-powered drug discovery have successively entered the capital markets. This rare "wave of listings" signals that Shanghai's AI industry is entering a "harvest period."
This is not a random capital frenzy. Unlike the single-point breakthrough model seen in other cities, Shanghai is constructing a complete ecosystem, from the "brain" (computing power and algorithms) to the "lifeblood" (data corpus) and the "limbs" (embodied intelligence). Differing from the "business model innovation" of the internet era, these five AI companies possess exceptionally high levels of hard technology. The capital market's endorsement stems from Shanghai's comprehensive, "rainforest-like" full-industry-chain layout.
Song Haitao, Dean of the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, indicated that innovation requires fertile ground, which in turn depends on a sufficiently large base of innovative entities to achieve critical mass. In the field of artificial intelligence, Shanghai's foundational base leads domestically in various aspects. "Shanghai has gathered a full industrial chain layout encompassing hardware, software, GPUs, algorithms, model training, and applications, which is unmatched by any other city in China."
In the AI 2.0 era, large models are the core engine. Instead of opting for simple "application shelling," Shanghai is focusing intensely on underlying technologies, using its large model industry ecosystem to incubate the AI sector.
As a source of innovation, Shanghai has assembled fundamental R&D platforms like the Shanghai AI Laboratory and the Center for Brain Science and Brain-Like Research, alongside industry innovation centers and AI labs/accelerators such as the Shanghai Qizhi Institute, China Telecom Shanghai AI Research Institute, Shanghai Algorithm Innovation Research Institute, Shanghai Science AI Research Institute, Microsoft, and Amazon. The city has gathered 250,000 AI talents, accounting for one-third of the national total.
Information obtained from the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization indicates that the annual tasks of the "Shanghai Solution" for artificial intelligence were fully completed in 2025. In the first three quarters of 2025, the combined revenue of 394 designated large-scale enterprises in the city reached 435.492 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 39.6%, with total profits reaching 40.781 billion yuan, up 11.4% year-on-year. The sector overall showed a positive trend of scale expansion and efficiency improvement. The scale of the large-scale AI industry for the full year is expected to exceed 550 billion yuan, with growth exceeding 30%.
Founded in early 2022, MiniMax is a typical representative of Shanghai's native large model companies. As the world's fastest AI company to go from founding to IPO, this firm, with an average employee age of 29 and a total staff of 385, has R&D personnel comprising a high 73.8% of its workforce. Their developed MiniMax-M2 model demonstrates code generation speeds twice that of the US AI company Claude, yet at only 8% of the cost, achieving an output efficiency that "does the work of ten."
As of September 2025, MiniMax had 212 million individual users and 27.6 million monthly active users. Its platform Xingye became the world's second-largest AI-native interactive platform, with users averaging over 70 minutes of daily usage time, nearing TikTok levels. More notably are its overseas expansion results; in the first three quarters of 2025, overseas revenue accounted for 73.1% of its total, forming a distinct advantage in global layout.
"From its establishment to September 2025, spending approximately $500 million, compared to OpenAI's expenditure of $40 to $55 billion, MiniMax used less than 1% of the funds to build a globally leading full-modal company," said Yan Yijun, Vice President of the company.
It's not just MiniMax. In building a model and algorithm innovation system, Shanghai has formed a development pattern characterized by "1 open-source base model + 3 commercial base models + N innovative models."
Staff from the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization explained that the Shanghai AI Laboratory focuses on developing the multimodal scientific large model Intern-S1, which has surpassed advanced closed-source models like Grok-4 on several scientific benchmarks, including comprehensive science and chemistry. Step星辰 created the Step-3 open-source multimodal reasoning model, which topped several authoritative multimodal capability evaluation lists like MMMU. Additionally, there is the aforementioned MiniMax-M2 model developed by MiniMax, and the Enlightenment World Model released by SenseTime, which boasts a Sim2Real realism rate exceeding 98% and saves customers nearly 50% in model training costs.
Computing power is the physical foundation of AI. As China's "GPU Capital," Shanghai has seen its "Four Little Dragons" gather in the capital markets: the previously successfully listed Metax Integrated Circuits (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. (688802.SH) and BIREN TECH (06082.HK), ILUVATAR COREX (09903.HK) which listed on the HKEX on January 8, and Suiyuan Technology, which has completed its IPO guidance and is冲刺 the STAR Market.
Yu Xuesong, Vice President of Strategy and Public Relations at ILUVATAR COREX, stated that the current AI technology revolution is driving explosive growth in computing power demand, bringing broad development space for the company. As the first domestic enterprise to carry out independent R&D of general-purpose GPUs, the company has completed the full chain from core technology breakthroughs to commercial implementation. "Shanghai offers comprehensive support in terms of industrial chain完善, investment and financing, and policy, such as annual funding support and feedback for tape-out subsidies and high-quality special projects, all at levels of tens of millions of yuan or more."
Behind Shanghai's GPU "Four Little Dragons" lies an integrated circuit industry that has been developing for decades. In the latest World IC Association "Global Integrated Circuit Industry Comprehensive Competitiveness Top 100 Cities" ranking, Shanghai placed fourth globally and first in mainland China.
Huang Xiangjun, R&D Vice President of Metax Integrated Circuits (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., which originated from Zhangjiang, Shanghai's IC hub, told reporters that talent aggregation is very important for their industry. Shen Yichen, CEO of X-Chip Photonics, also based in Zhangjiang, said many resources are concentrated in Zhangjiang.
"Many of our collaborations were initiated through casual interactions, like playing soccer, in Zhangjiang," Shen Yichen mentioned. From design and manufacturing to packaging, equipment, and materials, Shanghai has a full-chain layout in integrated circuits, from which X-Chip Photonics has benefited. X-Chip's optical interconnect chips have already been deployed in Shanghai at a scale of thousands of cards. In optical computing, related achievements were published in the top international journal *Nature* in March 2025 and are exploring advantages in large model inference applications. Furthermore, they have established the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Optical Computing with Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Silicon photonics, as a disruptive technological path in the "post-Moore's Law era," is a strategic area of global high attention and focused development. Shanghai highly values frontier technological innovation and future industry cultivation in silicon photonics, vigorously promoting project layout, platform construction, and ecosystem development. On June 28 last year, the Shanghai Silicon Photonics Future Industry Cluster Zone was officially launched for construction in the Pudong New Area.
Shen Yichen noted that the mass production issues for silicon photonic chips have been resolved with municipal support. In his view, within the next three to five years, optical interconnection will become a universally adopted technical solution across the computing power industry.
Relevant staff from the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization reported that Shanghai has now established an integrated circuit industry chain system where all segments advance together and support each other. It has nurtured a group of leading enterprises in various sub-sectors across chip design, manufacturing, packaging and testing, equipment/materials, and EDA/IP, including 35 companies listed on the STAR Market, ranking first domestically. The chip design and manufacturing sectors continue to hold leading domestic positions, advanced packaging is accelerating its layout, equipment and materials are leading the high-end, and EDA/IP are developing集聚. Besides the GPU chip "Four Little Dragons," AI chip companies following innovative paths like optical computing and near-memory computing have also emerged, supporting the development of new quality productive forces such as domestic large models.
Beyond the "brain" and "lifeblood" of AI, humanoid robots represent the most ideal and complex载体 for embodied intelligence.
Just last month, on the afternoon of December 8, the 5,000th unit of Agile Robots' general-purpose embodied robot rolled off the production line. Peng Zhihui, Co-founder, President, and CTO of Agile Robots, stated that 5,000 units is a milestone and, more importantly, the starting point of a new journey. This achievement not only validates Agile Robots' own mass delivery capability, laying the foundation for subsequent plans of ten-thousand and hundred-thousand-unit capacity, but also demonstrates the feasibility of mass production for general-purpose embodied robots to the entire industry.
This Shanghai-based robotics company, founded in 2023, had just celebrated the production of its 1,000th mass-produced general-purpose embodied robot early in 2025, at which time it immediately announced plans to build a second-phase factory in Zhangjiang with an annual capacity of approximately 10,000 humanoid robots.
When asked about the rapid scaling of their production speed, Zhu Jie, Vice President of Agile Robots, explained that their upstream partners are largely traditional manufacturing enterprises. During the trial磨合 phase, the comprehensive upstream and downstream enterprises provided significant support. "Roughly over 50% of our supply chain partners are in the Yangtze River Delta region. Shanghai can leverage its advantage of radiating across the Yangtze River Delta to consolidate these supply chain strengths and help us achieve mass production."
In recent years, Shanghai has anchored itself to national strategic directions,全力抢抓 the development opportunities in the humanoid robotics industry.
Specifically, in terms of technological攻关, since 2025, over ten new humanoid robot models have been released. Breakthroughs have been made in a batch of key technologies including edge-side chips, intelligent modules, core components, and embodied models, accelerating the gathering of upstream and downstream产业链 enterprises in Shanghai.
Just on December 29 last year, Shanghai-based robot company STEP Electric released the industry's first embodied intelligent robot, SYNDA R1, designed for industrial applications. Since commencing production in 2020, the robot density within STEP's smart factory has increased from 1,080 robots per 10,000 employees to 1,200. Fan Zeng, Director of the Product and Application Center at Shanghai STEP Electric Robot Co., Ltd., stated that the Yangtze River Delta's supply chain is完备, and this close cooperation has tightly woven the industrial chain together. STEP's 2025 shipment volume of "fully Yangtze River Delta-made" robots far exceeded expectations and are widely used in industries such as auto parts, steel structures, and rubber tires.
The Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization also briefed media, including reporters, that Shanghai is enhancing the efficiency of embodied intelligence training grounds. It supports the National-Local Center in building the country's first virtual-real fusion embodied intelligence training ground and has布局分训练场 in places like Henan and Wuxiu with unified construction and data collection standards. Efforts are also underway to完善 the embodied corpus system, constructing high-quality datasets based on "physical robots + simulation + real scenes."
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