Hong Kong's paradox: why MiniMax and Zhipu are rising while the tech giants fall

Imagine a party where everyone suddenly turns glum, but a couple of people in the corner pop champagne and celebrate. That is roughly what the Hong Kong exchange looks like right now. While the main tech index, Hang Seng Tech, drifts glumly lower, the generative AI (GEO) sector is throwing a real celebration.

This is not a statistical blip but a clear picture of where money is actually flowing in 2024. China's market has long since stopped being predictable, but today it made one thing plain: investors no longer believe in abstract "technology," they believe in specific brains. MiniMax (MINIMAX-WP) and Zhipu are the two main names in this story.

While media giants such as Star CM lose ground, these two are up 8–10%. For those who do not follow the Chinese landscape: these are not just startups, they are Beijing's answer to OpenAI and Anthropic. Their rise against a falling market suggests that AI has become a kind of safe-haven asset for investors.

Ironically, precious metals and steel also rose the same day. Investors have effectively put neural networks on a par with gold. Why now?

After a year of loud promises and endless presentations, Chinese large language models have finally started to show their teeth. We are seeing real adoption in business processes and government orders. Mainland Chinese investors trading through the so-called "southbound" channel put almost one billion Hong Kong dollars into Hong Kong assets in a single day.

A significant share of that optimism landed in companies building generative models. MiniMax, for example, is now pushing hard into video generation, while Zhipu, which emerged from Tsinghua University, is building the country's most powerful open ecosystem. The shift in market logic is interesting to watch.

Previously the tech sector rose in lockstep: if Alibaba climbed, the whole index followed. Now we see a sharp split. Old tech, burdened by regulatory risk and slowing growth, drags the index down.

New tech, aggressive, hungry and focused solely on neural networks, pulls ahead. It is a classic case of a changing guard, where old leaders become ballast and new ones become locomotives. The market is making it clear: owning a cloud service or a messenger is no longer a guarantee of success.

You need AI, and not as a marketing slogan but as working architecture. Skeptics will, of course, start recalling the dot-com bubble. But look at MiniMax's numbers.

A gain above 10% in a session on a falling market is not just hype; it is institutional belief that these companies will become the foundation of China's new digital economy. With traditional media losing 3%, the GEO sector looks like the only place where you can still earn from the future rather than from the achievements of the past decade. Bottom line: Investors have finally separated "just IT" from "AI."

Market dynamics will now be driven not by retailers' reports but by progress in training models. Can MiniMax and Zhipu hold this pace once the first wave of euphoria fades?