Zhipu AI Reaches 7M API Users and Deploys 50,000 Domestic Chips
Chinese AI startup Zhipu AI has reportedly reached nearly 7 million API users on its MaaS platform and deployed over 50,000 domestic AI chips to support its growing inference demands. Additionally, the company has seen its Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) grow 15-fold this year, driven by rapid infrastructure optimization. This milestone highlights the rapid commercialization of Chinese LLMs and the shift toward domestic hardware to mitigate supply chain constraints. It also underscores how infrastructure efficiency—maximizing token output per chip—has become a critical competitive advantage and investment focus in the AI industry. Zhipu AI's developer tool ZCode surpassed one million users within a month of launch, while rumors suggest the company has built a 1-gigawatt domestic AI computing infrastructure. While rumors placed Zhipu's ARR at $2 billion, insiders suggest the actual figure is even higher.
## BACKGROUND
Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a cloud computing model that delivers pre-trained AI models to developers and businesses via APIs, eliminating the need for local infrastructure. Zhipu AI is a leading Chinese AI developer known for its GLM (General Language Model) family, which includes recent iterations like GLM-5 that utilize advanced architectures like Mixture of Experts (MoE).