China went from uninvestable to unavoidable—and Hong Kong is cashing in with a slew of AI-centric IPOs

Nicholas Gordon, Fortune’s Asia editor, filling in for Allie Garfinkle.

IPOs in the Chinese city raised almost $14 billion in the first quarter of the year, a jump of almost 490% year-on-year. That number keeps Hong Kong at the top of the world’s IPO league tables, building on last year’s stellar performance of $35 billion raised over more than 100 new listings. 

Before, Hong Kong’s success was all about secondary listings. Chinese giants like Midea and CATL, already listed on mainland Chinese exchanges, went to Hong Kong to tap the city’s connections to international capital.

But in 2026, the Hong Kong story is all about AI. MiniMax and Knowledge Atlas (better known as Z.ai), two frontier AI labs, Biren Technology, a chip design company, and Insilico Medicine, an AI drug discovery company, are just some of the standout listings from the past few months. 

There’s more to come: Manycore, a spatial design company and one of the Hangzhou-based “Little Dragons” will list in Hong Kong this week; Victory Giant, which makes printed circuit boards, is also raising funds in the city. Other AI companies reportedly considering IPOs are Moonshot AI, the developer of Kimi; Rokid, a manufacturer of smart glasses; and Kunlunxin, the chip unit of Baidu.

Hong Kong and Beijing are “essentially trying to do for Chinese AI what Nasdaq did for the internet,” says Drew Bernstein, co-chairman of Marcum Asia, an accounting firm.

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, the city’s stock exchange operator, calculated that companies that debuted in 2025 had an average first-day return of 40%. But that’s nothing compared to........

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