“Rising in both price and volume”! The Zhipu AI concept is surging wildly, and global Token usage is accelerating in growth.(Stocks attached.)

On Wednesday, Zhizhi AI’s concept surged more than 8%. Bluemont (Blue Current) and Yunjiy Information both hit the 20CM daily limit up. Uqude, HanDe Information, Capital Online, and others rose more than 10%.

Listed in Hong Kong, Zhipu closed up more than 11%, to HKD 868.50 per share. Its total market value exceeded HKD 380 billion.

JPMorgan: Zhipu’s API platform Token volume and price rise together

According to China Fund News, on April 8, Zhipu officially released the GLM-5.1 model and again raised prices by 10%. After the price increase, in the Coding scenario, the cached hit Token price of GLM-5.1 is close to Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6.

This is the first time a domestic large model has achieved price alignment with overseas leading vendors in a core scenario. And a year ago, domestic large model providers were still competing for market share with price cuts of more than 90%.

Zhipu said that GLM-5.1 is the most intelligent flagship model the company has ever made, and also the currently strongest open-source model globally.

In a recent research note, JPMorgan said that the Token price of the Zhipu API platform increased by 83% during the period from January 1, 2026 to March 31, 2026, while demand is still accelerating—both volume and price are rising in parallel. Against the backdrop of the current domestic large-model price war heating up, this phenomenon is extremely rare, directly confirming that Zhipu has formed substantive pricing power in high-value scenarios such as programming and agents.

JPMorgan believes that with the continued persistence of triple-digit revenue growth rates and the continued expansion of API gross margin (only 3% in 2024, already up to 19% in 2025), the timeline for profitability is becoming increasingly clear, and it expects the company to achieve profitability in 2029.

A research note from CICC also shows that it maintains a “outperform the industry” rating for Zhipu. Considering adjustments to earnings forecasts and valuation’s central tendency comprehensively, it raised the target price by 13% to HKD 900, corresponding to 50x P/S for 2027 (since visibility of 2027 revenue is relatively clear, the valuation was switched to 2027).

The institution’s research note states that Zhipu’s 2025 performance met expectations. During the period, revenue was RMB 724 million, up 132% year over year. Specifically, the MaaS API revenue segment and profit margin grew much more than expected. Revenue increased 293% year over year to RMB 190 million, gross margin rose 5x year over year to 18.9%, and API Token profitability improved significantly. As of March 2026, MaaS API ARR reached RMB 1.7 billion (about USD 250 million), up 60x year over year. Due to improvements in model intelligence + expansion of downstream demand, the growth trend of 2026 API ARR will be far above market expectations.

Unlike last year’s price-war narrative that permeated domestic large model providers, since this year, domestic model providers have collectively entered a price-increase cycle. In March alone, three major leading providers—Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Baidu Intelligent Cloud—issued pricing adjustment announcements in succession within a week, raising prices for AI computing capacity services and related large-model products. Among them, some models in Tencent Cloud’s Hunyuan series saw a rise as high as 463.13%. Alibaba Cloud’s Pingtouge Zhenwu 810E and other compute card products increased 5%—34%. Baidu Intelligent Cloud’s AI compute-related services increased 5%—30%. Multiple large models that had previously been free public trials simultaneously ended the dividend period and moved into commercial billing.

Zhipu AI concept high-yield growth potential stocks exposed

Oriental Fortune Choice data shows that, based on the consensus forecast data for 2026 net profit growth rate, among Zhipu AI concept stocks, 15 stocks are expected to have 2026 net profit growth rates exceeding 20%.

Some of these stocks have already disclosed their 2025 annual reports. For example, Uqude’s 2025 annual report shows net profit growth exceeded 68%, and for 2026, the consensus forecast by institutions is for growth exceeding 100%.

Institutions: Global Token usage is entering a new round of accelerated growth

A research note from CITIC Securities shows that with the explosive growth of Agent applications and multimodal ecosystems, global Token usage is entering a new round of accelerated growth. According to OpenRouter data, over the past year, the weekly amount of consumed Tokens increased from 2.1T to 24.5T. Since 2026, weekly Token consumption has increased by 280%.

Looking at core vendors, according to company announcements, domestic Bytes (Doubao) achieved average daily Token consumption of 6.3 trillion in December 2025, which is basically on the same order of magnitude as overseas leaders OpenAI (5.2 trillion) and Google (6.5 trillion). Meanwhile, Doubao’s average daily Token consumption in March 2026 surpassed 12 trillion, achieving roughly a doubling of growth within three months.

On the supply side, according to company announcements, the total capital expenditures of the U.S. four major CSPs (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta) for 25/26 combined reached USD 400.2/650 billion, while China’s BBAT’s capital expenditures for 25/26 were only USD 50.716/8B. In the past two years, domestic capital expenditures have been severely insufficient. The institution believes that the significant mismatch between supply and demand indicates that the next two years will be a “big year” for capital expenditures across the domestic cloud industry chain.

A research note from CITIC Securities states that demand is pushing up the price level, and the cloud industry chain has entered a cycle where both volume and price rise together.

1）On the demand side, according to various vendors’ financial reports, domestic BBAT (Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, ByteDance) AI-related CapEx totaled USD 2B in 2025, up 53.8% year over year. CapEx planned for 2026 totals USD 8B, up only 32.1% year over year. In the future, there is a significant possibility that CSP vendors will further raise their capital expenditure outlook. In addition, facing massive Token computing demand as well as compliance and short-term capital expenditure pressures, major internet CSP vendors and major model vendors choose to shift to third-party cloud companies for procurement, and the demand spillover effect is significant.

2）On the price side, on February 11, Uqude issued an announcement regarding adjustments to product and service pricing increases. The main reason is that global supply chain fluctuations have continued to intensify, and infrastructure costs such as core hardware procurement have seen significant and structural increases. On March 18, according to Alibaba Cloud’s official website, due to the explosion of global AI demand and supply chain price increases, Alibaba Cloud AI compute, storage, and other products saw the maximum price increase of up to 34%. From Uqude’s price increase to Alibaba Cloud’s price increase, the firm judges that cloud vendors’ pricing increases have shifted from being driven earlier by upstream cost increases to being driven now by demand-driven inflation. The firm believes that a new round of accelerated growth in Token usage, together with the broader trend of cloud computing price increases, is gradually being fulfilled for the logic of volume and price rising together across the industry, and that it has strong sustainability.

（Source: Oriental Fortune Research Center）