China AI: Intelligence is all you need? Initiating coverage on Z.ai and Minimax

Research evidence excerpt

China AI: Intelligence is all you need? Initiating coverage on Z.ai and Minimax

4 August 2026

Initiation

China AI

China AI: Intelligence is all you need? Initiating coverage on Z.ai

and Minimax

Initiating coverage on China’s AI labs. We are initiating coverage on Z.ai on Outperform Robin Zhu

+852 2123 2659 (PT HK$1,350), and Minimax on Market-Perform (PT HK$275). Frontier AI sits at the

robin.zhu@bernsteinsg.com intersection of a generational tech cycle and global geostrategic competition. Domestically,

there is now a clear policy interest in building out a frontier AI industry. Outside China, we

Charles Gou expect token rationalisation to help support adoption of open source AI models.

+852 2123 2618

charles.gou@bernsteinsg.com

The Pareto frontier, and the right to win. We expect coding to remain the lingua franca

between man and machine as agentic AI moves toward recursive self-improvement, and Min-Joo Kang

+852 2123 2644 autonomous task completion. Among the AI labs, we expect the winners to be the ones

minjoo.kang@bernsteinsg.com that can (1) deliver differentiated “spikes” in performance; (2) capture convex willingness

to pay at the frontier; then (3) serve intelligence cheaply while funding the next training run.

Hyrum Caesar For investors, we expect model architecture and performance to remain the core of AI lab +81 3 6777 6979

hyrum.caesar@bernsteinsg.com analysis, with ARR growth and inference margins representing downstream outcomes.

The next leg of AI adoption. In contrast with AI adoption to date led by 1% of power users

spending $5k monthly, we expect the next leg of AI adoption to be driven by broader-based

use, and better matching of token costs with the value of task completion. As more tasks