Zhang Peng, CEO of Zhipu AI (now rebranded internationally as Z.ai), is one of the central figures behind China’s rise as a serious contender in frontier AI development. An engineer trained at Tsinghua University, Zhang joined the university’s Knowledge Engineering Group (KEG) after completing his master’s degree, where he helped lead development of the AMiner scientific intelligence platform.
In 2019, Zhang co-founded Zhipu AI alongside Tsinghua professor Tang Jie and fellow researcher Liu Debing, spinning the company out of years of academic research at KEG. The founding team’s guiding philosophy was rooted in what they call “first principles thinking” — a mindset that shaped major strategic pivots over the years, from going all-in on large models, to shifting toward smaller GLM models, and eventually returning to models with over 100 billion parameters.
Zhipu built its GLM family of language and multimodal models into one of China’s most widely adopted AI platforms. By mid-2025, GLM models had served more than 12,000 enterprise clients and 45 million developers worldwide, with nine of China’s top ten internet companies among its users. In 2024, Zhipu ranked first among China’s independent foundation-model developers by market share.
In January 2026, Zhipu went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with its stock briefly surging to a record HK$1 trillion market cap in 2025 before listing. Zhang has described the company’s ambition as becoming “China’s version of OpenAI,” pursuing both enterprise and consumer AI applications while emphasizing stability and controllability over hype-driven growth. Under his leadership, Zhipu — now Z.ai — continues to position itself among the most influential AI companies to emerge from China’s research institutions.
