Companies / MiniMax
Frontier AI lab
MiniMax
State of play as of
The Shanghai lab behind the MiniMax M-series and the H3 video model, listed in Hong Kong since January 2026, which now earns most of its money selling tokens into other companies’ products.
MiniMax is the cohort member whose business has already changed shape, and its own half-year disclosure is where you can see it happen. The company spent two years building a consumer super-app; in the first half of 2026 open-platform and enterprise revenue reached 63.4 percent of the total, against 30.3 percent a year earlier. That is a wholesaler’s revenue mix, not an app company’s. The number to hold it against is the cloud commitment: on 31 August 2026 MiniMax raised the ceiling on a three-year Alibaba Cloud agreement by 220 percent to 1.2 billion dollars, with annual caps of 300, 400 and 500 million dollars for 2026 through 2028. Half-year revenue was 117 million dollars at a 17.9 percent gross margin, so the committed compute bill for 2026 alone is more than twice what the company booked in six months, and Alibaba is both the counterparty and a shareholder, which is why the change had to be disclosed at all. The second thing this page keeps straight is that MiniMax is not one policy on openness. It tightened the licence on its flagship text model in April 2026 and then open-sourced a video model in August that went to the top of the boards Western developers watch. Both are true, they are different product lines, and the market figures on this page are dated because we have not re-read them since the dates given.
Fast facts
- What it is
- A Chinese frontier AI lab with offices in Shanghai and incorporation in Hong Kong, founded and led by Yan Junjie (闫俊杰), who came out of SenseTime. Its model lines are the M-series text models, most recently M3, and the H-series multimodal models, most recently the open-weight video model H3.钛媒体 twelve-year SenseTime retrospective; 上证报, via CAD
- First-half 2026 revenue
- 117 million dollars, up 283.1 percent year on year, at a 17.9 percent gross margin, with an attributable net loss of 358 million dollars that narrowed 11 percent. The two disclosed segments sum to the total: open-platform and enterprise at 73.9 million and the company’s own consumer AI products at 42.6 million.ITHome; TechNode, 27 Aug 2026, via CAD
- The mix shift, which is the story
- Open-platform and enterprise revenue rose 703.1 percent to 73.9 million dollars in the first half, reaching 63.4 percent of total revenue against 30.3 percent a year earlier. Revenue from MiniMax’s own consumer AI products grew 100.9 percent to 42.6 million dollars. Gross profit rose 464.8 percent to 20.8 million.TechNode, 27 Aug 2026, via CAD
- The Alibaba Cloud commitment
- On 31 August 2026 MiniMax raised the ceiling on its three-year Alibaba Cloud agreement by 220 percent, from 375 million dollars to 1.2 billion. The annual caps went to 300 million dollars for 2026, 400 million for 2027 and 500 million for 2028, from 115, 125 and 135 million. Alibaba is both the counterparty and a shareholder, which is the reason the revision had to be disclosed.TechNode, 31 Aug 2026, via CAD
- Flagship model
- MiniMax M3, released 1 June 2026 with a 1M-token context and the weights published about ten days later, priced at 119 yuan a month for 18 billion tokens. Artificial Analysis places it seventh on its global intelligence index; MiniMax reports 93.2 percent on GPQA Diamond and a SWE-Bench Pro result above GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro and below Claude Opus 4.7, which is the lab’s own claim rather than an independent run.Artificial Analysis; MiniMax technical report, via CAD
- Open weights, with one exception
- In April 2026 MiniMax changed the licence on its M2.7 text model from MIT to a designation it called Modified-MIT, under which non-commercial use stays free but hosting a service requires written authorisation, and the developer reaction was hostile mostly about the naming. In August it went the other way on video: H3, released on 3 August 2026, shipped with open weights, took first place on the Artificial Analysis video-editing benchmark and the Arena image-to-video board, and became the most-trending model on Hugging Face ahead of DeepSeek’s V4-Flash, with the team then signalling it was considering an Apache-2.0 release.Leiphone; InfoQ, via CAD
- Listing
- Listed in Hong Kong in January 2026, raising about 620 million dollars with Alibaba and Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund among the investors, and filed for an A-share secondary listing on 1 June 2026, the same day it released M3. Zhipu listed in Hong Kong the same month and filed for A-shares on the same day, which 36Kr read as Hong Kong supplying global valuation and the A-share market supplying domestic strategic standing.36Kr; Business Times Singapore, via CAD
- Market figures, as of the dates given
- MiniMax’s market capitalisation passed Baidu’s 61 days after its Hong Kong debut, reported 7 May 2026. On 1 June 2026 the Hong Kong shares were up more than 400 percent since the January listing, from HK$165 to HK$840. Abu Dhabi’s ADIA turned a 65 million dollar cornerstone allocation into more than 400 million within three months of the IPO. None of these figures has been re-read since the date attached to it, and they are recorded as dated points rather than as the current price.Business Times Singapore, via CAD, 26 Mar and 7 May 2026; CAD, 1 Jun 2026
- Scale of usage, as reported
- 36Kr put MiniMax at 236 million global users with about 70 percent of revenue earned overseas, in a June 2026 comparison with Zhipu, whose revenue is more than 70 percent domestic and weighted to government and financial customers. On OpenRouter, M2.5 processed 4.55 trillion tokens in a two-week window in March 2026, at 230 billion total parameters with 10 billion active per query.36Kr; TMTPost; 新浪财经, via CAD
The state of play
MiniMax raised the ceiling on its three-year Alibaba Cloud agreement by 220 percent, to 1.2 billion dollars, with annual caps going to 300 million dollars for 2026, 400 million for 2027 and 500 million for 2028, from 115, 125 and 135 million. The disclosure exists because Alibaba is both the counterparty and a shareholder, so the revision is a connected transaction rather than an ordinary procurement. Read against the half-year numbers published four days earlier, the 2026 cap alone is more than twice the 117 million dollars of revenue MiniMax booked in the first half, at a 17.9 percent gross margin. That is the shape of the whole sector right now: model revenue in China has grown large enough to be worth reporting and is being handed almost entirely to the companies that supply the compute.
MiniMax reported first-half 2026 open-platform and enterprise revenue of 73.9 million dollars, up 703.1 percent, reaching 63.4 percent of total revenue against 30.3 percent a year earlier, while revenue from its own consumer AI products grew 100.9 percent to 42.6 million dollars and gross profit rose 464.8 percent to 20.8 million. The company that spent two years chasing a consumer super-app now earns most of its money selling tokens into other people’s products. The group figures published alongside are 117 million dollars of revenue, up 283.1 percent, a 17.9 percent gross margin, and an attributable net loss of 358 million dollars that narrowed 11 percent year on year. The two segment lines sum to the group total, so the mix shift is a real reallocation rather than an artefact of how the segments are drawn.
MiniMax open-sourced H3, a general multimodal video model, and it took first place on the Artificial Analysis video-editing benchmark and the Arena image-to-video board, becoming the most-trending model on Hugging Face by midweek, ahead of DeepSeek’s V4-Flash. Stable Diffusion founder Emad Mostaque and a16z partner Justine Moore both praised it publicly, more than a hundred partners integrated it within a day of release, and the stock closed up more than 10 percent. In a Reddit AMA that followed, the team signalled it was considering an Apache-2.0 licence, a 2K-output release and an image model. The shift worth noting is in the questions developers asked: they stopped asking which benchmark H3 beat and started asking whether they could run 2K locally and reproduce the pipeline.
Yan Junjie said he would take no salary until AGI is reached, in an internal letter published as MiniMax’s newly raised cash cleared and its lock-up period ended. Zhipu’s Tang Jie published a comparable letter the same week announcing a two-year push he calls Touch High. Both letters refocus their companies on capability over near-term revenue at precisely the moment the market expected them to start monetising, which is the timing that makes them worth recording.
MiniMax released its M3 flagship on the same day it filed for an A-share secondary listing. M3 carries a 1M-token context, with weights published about ten days after launch, and MiniMax reports a SWE-Bench Pro score above GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro and below Claude Opus 4.7. The internal proof-of-concept the company published with it is the part that is its own claim and not an independent result: M3 spent 24 hours self-optimising a CUDA kernel from scratch, making 147 benchmark submissions and 1,959 tool calls, lifting Hopper FP8 hardware utilisation from 7.6 percent to 71.3 percent, a 9.4 times acceleration, with no human intervention. Artificial Analysis independently places M3 seventh on its global intelligence index. Two days later 36Kr set the A-share filing beside Zhipu’s, filed the same day, and read the pair as one trade: Hong Kong for global valuation and index inclusion, the A-share market for domestic standing and access to government procurement. It put MiniMax at 236 million global users with about 70 percent of revenue from overseas, against Zhipu at more than 70 percent domestic.
MiniMax changed the licence on its M2.7 model from MIT to a designation it called Modified-MIT, which leaves non-commercial use free but requires written authorisation to host a service on the model. The developer reaction was immediate and negative, and it was aimed largely at the naming rather than the terms, because MIT has always explicitly allowed commercial use and a licence that does not is not a modified MIT in any meaningful sense. The company had listed in Hong Kong three months earlier after raising about 620 million dollars from investors including Alibaba and Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund.
Our reporting on MiniMax
- Zhipu Grew Revenue 400% and Its Gross Margin Halved
Z.AI, the entity Zhipu lists under in Hong Kong at stock code 2513, filed interim results on 31 August 2026 covering the six months to 30 June. Revenue was 953.892 million yuan, up 399.7 percent, while gross margin fell from 50.0 percent to 26.4 percent. The move is mix rather than discounting: open-platform and API revenue was 825.176 million yuan, up 2,735.7 percent, and went from 15.2 percent of revenue to 86.5 percent, while on-premises deployment fell from 73.7 percent of 2025 revenue to 13.5 percent of this half. Token volume on the MaaS platform is up more than 40 times since the start of 2026 and the average API selling price rose about 101 percent over the same stretch, so volumes surged while prices went up. That leaves the 24.6 percent gross margin on the open-platform and API business a cost problem, not a pricing one.
- Huawei Stopped Generating Cash in the First Half
Huawei filed its 2026 half-year report with the Beijing Financial Assets Exchange on 31 August, a disclosure it owes onshore bond buyers rather than shareholders. Revenue was 467.82 billion yuan, up 9.6 percent, and net profit attributable to the parent was 23.43 billion, down 36.8 percent. Net cash from operating activities was negative 39.89 billion yuan against a positive 31.18 billion a year earlier, a swing of 71.07 billion in a half when sales grew. Cash paid for goods and services rose 35 percent to 425.2 billion yuan, an increase of about 110.9 billion against revenue growth of about 40.8 billion, and inventory reached 277.5 billion yuan, up 45 percent from the end of 2025. Research and development took 121.38 billion yuan, 25.9 percent of revenue, which on its own accounts for the profit fall but not for the cash.
- Changxin Stopped Asking for Money
Changxin Technology, the listed parent of CXMT, filed first-half revenue of 150.31 billion yuan, up 873.64 percent, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 77.605 billion yuan against a 2.332 billion yuan loss in the same half of 2025. Gross margin was 84.74 percent, against 13.00 percent a year earlier. The line that decides what it means is the cash flow statement: operating activities threw off 131.156 billion yuan of net cash while financing contributed 1.002 billion, so the company covered a 35.577 billion yuan investing programme nearly four times over out of what it sold. Across all of 2025 it had taken 46.121 billion yuan net from financing.
- Financed at Home
CXMT’s over-allotment option was exercised in full without the bookrunner spending any of it, because the stock never traded below its 8.66 yuan issue price during the window, taking the raise to 66.607 billion yuan gross, about 9.9 billion dollars. YMTC’s 33 billion yuan Shanghai application was accepted on 24 August, and Enflame set 2 September for subscription against a 6 billion yuan target. That is 105.6 billion yuan asked of China’s domestic equity market for DRAM, NAND and AI silicon inside roughly five weeks. CXMT’s first quarter of 2026 alone earned 24.76 billion yuan on 50.80 billion of revenue, at a 79.2 percent gross margin.
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Common questions
What is MiniMax?
MiniMax is a Chinese frontier AI lab with offices in Shanghai and incorporation in Hong Kong, founded and led by Yan Junjie (闫俊杰), who came out of SenseTime. It builds the M-series text models, currently M3, and the H-series multimodal models, currently the open-weight video model H3. It listed in Hong Kong in January 2026, raising about 620 million dollars with Alibaba and Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund among the investors, and filed for an A-share secondary listing on 1 June 2026.
How does MiniMax make money?
Mostly by selling model access to other companies rather than by selling a consumer app, and that changed recently enough to be visible in one disclosure. In the first half of 2026 open-platform and enterprise revenue was 73.9 million dollars, up 703.1 percent year on year and 63.4 percent of total revenue, against 30.3 percent a year earlier. Revenue from MiniMax’s own consumer AI products was 42.6 million dollars, up 100.9 percent. Group revenue was 117 million dollars, up 283.1 percent, at a 17.9 percent gross margin, with an attributable net loss of 358 million dollars that narrowed 11 percent.
Is MiniMax profitable?
No. It reported an attributable net loss of 358 million dollars for the first half of 2026 on 117 million dollars of revenue, which is a loss roughly three times revenue, though the loss narrowed 11 percent year on year while revenue grew 283.1 percent. The gross margin of 17.9 percent is the number that explains why growth alone does not close the gap: most of what customers pay flows straight back out as compute cost, and MiniMax has committed to as much as 1.2 billion dollars of Alibaba Cloud spending over 2026 to 2028.
Are MiniMax models open source?
It depends which model, and the answer has moved in both directions. In April 2026 MiniMax changed the licence on its M2.7 text model from MIT to a designation it called Modified-MIT: non-commercial use, including research and self-hosted development, stays free, but hosting a service on the model requires written authorisation from MiniMax. In August 2026 it released the H3 video model with open weights, and the team then said publicly it was considering an Apache-2.0 licence for it. M3, released 1 June 2026, had its weights published about ten days after launch. So the video line is genuinely open and the flagship text line carries a commercial-use condition.
Why does MiniMax owe Alibaba 1.2 billion dollars?
It does not owe it; it has committed to spend up to that much. On 31 August 2026 MiniMax raised the ceiling on a three-year Alibaba Cloud agreement by 220 percent, from 375 million dollars to 1.2 billion, with annual caps of 300 million dollars for 2026, 400 million for 2027 and 500 million for 2028, up from 115, 125 and 135 million. It was disclosed because Alibaba is both the cloud supplier and a shareholder, making it a connected transaction. The scale is the point: the 2026 cap alone is more than twice the revenue MiniMax booked in the first half of the year.
Every dated fact above traces to a named source, and where it comes from our reporting, to the dated issue that carried it. Where a claim is self-reported or disputed, we say so.