Z.ai nears $1 billion in annual sales: free models, paid enterprise push

Chinese AI company Z.ai, the outfit formerly called Zhipu, is getting close to the $1 billion annual sales line in 2026. Bloomberg says the company is reaching that level through a combination of booked revenue and annualized recurring revenue.

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Bloomberg reports that Z.ai brought in 724 million yuan in 2025, roughly $100 million, up 131.9% from a year earlier. JPMorgan projects about 4.6 billion yuan in 2026 and 30.9 billion yuan by 2028.

Taken together, that puts Z.ai among the clearest examples of China’s AI companies turning attention into actual paying customers, and doing it at scale, not just piling up downloads, hype, and fresh funding rounds.

Bloomberg says Z.ai gets there by offering free models such as GLM-5.2, then charging for cloud access, enterprise customization, technical support, and on-premises deployments. Reportedly, 73.7% of its 2025 revenue came from deployments at state-owned enterprises and financial institutions.

On Bloomberg’s numbers, Z.ai’s open-platform ARR hit 1.7 billion yuan, about 60 times higher than the year before. API usage also kept climbing, up 400% even after an 83% price increase in Q1 2026.

There’s still a catch: Bloomberg says Z.ai posted a 2025 net loss of 4.72 billion yuan, and JPMorgan doesn’t expect the company to turn a profit until 2028. If you pay attention to AI business models, this one is worth tracking as Z.ai goes up against Moonshot AI, MiniMax, DeepSeek, Alibaba, and ByteDance, while also pushing into the Middle East, Singapore, the UK, and Malaysia.

GLM-5.2 is available as a free download. Z.ai’s paid services, meanwhile, are aimed at enterprise customers.